Van Horssen Group SEM Case Study
Company Overview
The Van Horssen Group is an exotic car club that specializes in fractional ownership of exotic and luxury cars. Their collection includes a Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Porsche, Aston Martin, as well as several other unique vehicles. Members are able to use the cars on a scheduled basis and participate in organized club activities such as track days. Additionally, the cars are available for short term rental to non members.
The company uses two marketing channels: print advertisements in luxury oriented magazines and their web site. The firm that designed the web site also handled all the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Cost Per Click (CPC) management up until the end of January 2008. As of February 1st no active Internet marketing took place. Subsequently, the Van Horssen Group web site experienced a significant decrease in traffic and lead submissions.
Vista Web Media’s Solution
In April of 2008, Vista Web Media was retained to manage all Internet Marketing for the Van Horssen Group. The Van Horssen Group had two vital needs. First, it had to generate qualified leads immediately since they lacked a proactive Internet marketing strategy since January. Second, the site needed a long term lead generation solution.
In order to generate leads quickly, Vista Web Media developed a Google and Yahoo CPC campaign. Once that was established the web site was optimized to get maximum exposure in the search engines.
Cost Per Click Campaign
The top priority for the Van Horssen Group was to generate leads as soon as possible. In December of 2007 the site generated 43 leads. This number fell below 10 a month in January, February, and March. During the first week of the engagement, Vista Web Media performed keyword research and developed a Google Adwords campaign targeting Arizona, Nevada, and California.
The increase in traffic was immediate. In the first month an additional 1,324 unique visitors were generated. Of these new visitors 53 leads were created. Comparing March to April, total online lead submission increased 628%. As the campaigns matured, the number of lead submissions grew.
This growth was accomplished by constantly refining the keywords, ad copy, and creating targeted landing pages. Additionally, multivariate testing was performed on the landing pages in order to maximize conversions.
By actively managing the campaign, Vista Web Media reduced the overall cost per click by 25% over a six month period. This resulted in a cost savings of over $2,500. Even though they were paying less per click, the quality of the landing pages and high click through rate enabled their ads to appear in the top 3 positions.
Overall, these refinements helped grow the number of leads quickly and reduced their cost of acquisition.
Search Engine Optimization
The second approach to generating traffic for the web site was to perform search engine optimization. Despite pervious SEO efforts, the Van Horssen Group web site did not have a top 10 Google or Yahoo ranking for Exotic Car Club, Exotic Car Sharing, or Fractional Car Ownership. Additionally, they only had 100 keyword phrases that generated traffic.
While the site was graphically pleasing, easy to navigate, and well coded, there were several problems preventing it from generating significant search engine rankings. The primary hindrances were:
- Lack of keyword focus on the individual pages
- Poor internal linking
- Very few one way links
Before starting any optimization, Vista Web Media performed extensive research to determine which keywords would generate a significant amount of targeted traffic. Once the research was completed, each page was modified to increase its keyword relevancy. Additionally, the linking structure of the site was altered to support the keywords on the site. Finally, and most importantly, Vista Web Media started a link building campaign.
The changes to the web site took approximately 30 days to produce an increase in traffic. Between April and May, the site’s traffic from organic searches increased 60%. At the end of September, the site had increased its organic search engine traffic by 335.59% and added 278 one way links.
The links, in addition to the modifications, produced top 10 ranking for all the keywords requested. Also, the overall number of keywords the site generated traffic for increased by 458.42%.
Summary
The Van Horssen Group needed to increase the number of targeted leads in order to grow its business. Vista Web Media was able to provide a solution that generated immediate leads as well as develop a long term lead generation solution.
The Google and Yahoo CPC campaigns generated an additional 7,189 unique visitors over a 6 month period. These visitors resulted in 512 new leads. During the first month of management, lead submissions increased 628%. Not only did the leads steadily grow month over month but Vista Web Media’s active management also reduced advertising costs by 25%.
To produce additional long term traffic, Vista Web Media performed search engine optimization on the web site. In 30 days the amount of free traffic from the search engines increased 60%. By the end of September, organic traffic from all search engines had increased 335%. Every keyword targeted ranked in the top 10 of Google and Yahoo. In addition to the targeted keywords, the web site increased the number of traffic generating keywords by 458%.
These two strategies combined created a tremendous increase in market exposure as well as tangible leads. By having Vista Web Media actively managing their online campaigns, the Van Horssen Group’s sales team had more leads to contact month over month and at the same time the cost to acquire those leads decreased.
Find out how we can help with your Internet marketing campaigns. Contact us today »