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We were approached in early 2005 by Choice Dolls Houses to have a look at their web site and find out why it wasn’t making them any money.
Christmas should be a busy time for anyone who works in the toy industry, but for Choice the Christmas season had not been encouraging.
As a new web-based business, they desperately needed more sales and attracting more visitors to the web site was a good way of achieving this.
We produced a full analysis of the issues faced by the web site, including ‘on page’ issues such as text and site structure, and ‘off page’ factors including what other sites were saying about Choice Dolls Houses.
The first step that we recommended was changing the name of the site from www.choicedollshouses.com (registered November 2004) to an older name that they had acquired a few years earlier, www.chce.co.uk. The reason for this is that search engines treat older domain names more favourably, as new domains can sometimes be used for 'Spam' web sites which use underhand means to attract visitors. Sites found to be using these practices are penalised by search engines by lowering their position in search engine results pages, or even removing them from search results altogether.
For this reason, search engines tend to ignore web sites which are less than a year old. Older sites which can be seen to have been 'playing by the rules' for some time are more likely to achieve good positioning in search engine results for the relevant terms. There was also a suspicion that the newer name had been compromised in attempts to optimise it for search engines, resulting in it being banned or partially de-listed by Google.
We discussed all these issues with the site developer and extensive changes were made following our proposals. We then started a monthly program of search engine promotion, and the results were impressive. The site quickly rose to #1 in Google for the term ‘dolls houses’, as well as for a number of other terms such as ‘toy figures’. We would get calls from Choice Dolls Houses asking us to try to reduce the prominence of the site because they were not used to being so busy.
The results of working with i-Zimbra are that Choice Dolls Houses started doubling turnover year-on-year. They now sell more dolls’ houses all year round, and Christmas is of course a frantically busy time. If they have a glut of a particular product, they simply tell us and we focus on promoting it until they are top of Google for that search term. And all of this without using any paid online advertising, just a simple monthly maintenance program.
Although i-Zimbra was not involved in the design or build of the Choice Dolls Houses web site, it was our application of tried and tested search engine promotion techniques that raised the web site's online profile and brought paying customers to the site. In a short time, Choice Dolls Houses transformed from a struggling new business which was about to die to a thriving online store.
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Working with i-Zimbra is great because they know how we need to have our sites built. As a web marketing company ourselves, it is vital that our sites look great and are web standards compliant.Katherine Dawson
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