Anytime Costumes is a year-round costume store with more than 30 years of retail experience. In 1999, the retailer decided to expand to the Internet.
Unfortunately, the expansion was not as successful as the company had hoped and Anytime Costumes’ Web site at www.anytimecostumes.com had only 40 percent of its key phrases on the first page of the search engines through organic search. Like many other retailers, most site visitors and revenue from the Internet came from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising through Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing.
PPC advertising increased revenues for Anytime Costumes, according to company owner Meredith Abraham. However, her firm needed to find a way to reduce expenses and increase revenues through natural search. A good combination of both would allow the company to continue offering costumes to clients.
Anytime Costumes knew that in order to attract more visitors to its site, it needed to improve its organic search engine ranking results.
The retailer turned to InfoSearch Media’s ContentLogic product to help obtain better rankings. Over the course of eight months, ContentLogic handled two separate content campaigns for Anytime Costumes.
The first campaign, launched on July 13, 2005, involved creating and tailoring 40 keywords believed to be exact matches for what Anytime’s customers were looking for when they went to a search engine. ContentLogic worked very closely with Anytime Costumes for a month prior to the launch, helping the retailer to hone these keyword phrases with the goal of creating the most return on investment for the company.
We worked closely with Anytime Costumes to identify its unique offerings. We needed to educate the site visitor about those benefits, as well as give them a reason to purchase costumes. In a purely competitive market, we had to find a way for Anytime Costumes to stand apart, and unique, customized content was the answer.
ContentLogic created 40 new pages for the retailer’s site. Each page featured concise content written specifically for one keyword phrase, and the content was optimized to improve organic results on the major search engines.
As a result of the new content, Anytime Costumes began to see immediate results from the campaign. Within the first 90 days, 70 percent of the new keywords were ranking on Google’s first page of organic search results, significantly increasing the site’s exposure. It became apparent that all content is not created equal, and ContentLogic’s approach was helping the company’s bottom line.
Pleased with the results, Anytime Costumes tasked ContentLogic with a second campaign that went even further, focusing on 225 keywords. The second campaign launched on February 1, 2006.
Because ContentLogic created 225 new pages for the site, it also assisted the retailer with site architecture and created additional sitemaps to allow the search engines to index the site faster.
ContentLogic’s team helped Anytime Costumes identify keywords. Its writing team of search engine specialists and Web integrators created and added more than 250 new pages for anytimecostumes.com.
The results were immediate. Within one month of integration for the first campaign of 40 keywords, Anytime Costumes appeared on the first page of organic search results of the major search engines for 70 percent of the keyword phrases.
To date, the launch of the second campaign has yielded the following results among the three major search engines: 41 first-place rankings; 253 top 10 rankings; 366 top 20 rankings; and 409 top 30 rankings
In addition, the site architecture changes made by ContentLogic and natural links obtained by creating unique content resulted in a 300 percent increase in back links recognized by Google, Yahoo and MSN. Anytime Costumes has seen a dramatic increase in the number of pages indexed as well.
“Our revenue and conversions have increased,” Ms. Abraham tells us.
“We invested in our site and in our content, and now we understand how key organic search result traffic is to our bottom line.”
