SEO Case Study

Outrank both local and national competitors including Fan Fanatics, a global leader in licensed sports merchandise that leverages an innovative, tech-infused approach to selling fan gear.

• Competitive Analysis
• Research
• Strategic Planning
• Implementation
• Results

Fan Fanatics was ranking #1 and #2 despite both sites lacking SEO fundamentals such as keyword alignment, optimized content, and quality anchor text. These sites did have an impressive number of quality backlinks which appeared to be the result of a Google AdWords campaign.

Keyword Planner to discover potential keywords and estimated monthly traffic.

TagCrowd.com was used to understand how content was being optimized.

Inspecting source code revealed keyword stuffing in metadata.

Google Analytics was used to establish benchmarks for average monthly visits and new visits via organic search queries.

These metrics were then used to extrapolate estimated competitor traffic and identify our goal of increasing traffic by 20%.

To communicate this goal in terms of sales, these metrics were compounded by average total sale divided by the industry standard conversion rate for eCommerce sites.

My strategic plan involved both on and off-page SEO. While I was confident that the Fan Fanatics site could be outranked with some fundamental SEO methodologies, the off-page SEO consisted of submitting carefully crafted listings submitted to over 75 online business directories as a long-term solution for good measure.

My on-page optimization efforts included the basics; updating meta content, page title, adding our keyword phrase to headings, alt and title tags, adding 250 words of optimized text, and linking our keyword phrase thought the site back to our home page.

My first task was to make a global change and make the name of the Bookstore more consistent throughout the site. This was also an opportunity to differentiate from other universities using the initialism CS, such as Cleveland State University or Columbia Southern University. I wrote a jQuery script to find each of the variances and replace with ‘Colorado State University Bookstore’. While this change has little to do with search engine optimization, as a digital marketing specialist, the change was necessary to create a consistent online presence for the Bookstore brand.

Next, I wrote a deep link jQuery script that replaced certain phrases throughout the Bookstore website with our keyword phrase, then added a hyperlink back to our keyword optimized page, and finally added our keyword phrase to the link title attribute. In some instances, adding our keyword phrase to existing content was not as seamless as originally thought. For example, merchandise pages contained specific text about materials, graphics, fit and care instructions. My solution was to add a value-added statement that includes the keyword phrase to each product description.

To increase our text to code ratio, I added a 250-word keyword optimized description of Bookstore services and benefits.

Updating metatags proved to be more of a challenge. While I had access to content via the content management system, FTP access to the root directory and more importantly the header of the site itself, was off limits. To circumvent this problem, I wrote another jQuery script that updated the page title, keyword and description metadata. While this script would only impact the site in the document object model –