RestorationHardware.com optimizes search and sees conversions rise 236%
The web site of home furnishings and accessories retailer Restoration Hardware saw conversions from non-branded search terms -- general searches for “leather sofa,” for example, rather than “Restoration Hardware sofa” -- increase 236% within four months after implementing natural search optimization recommendations from iCrossing, according to the search engine marketing firm.
Restoration Hardware already was managing a paid search program in-house, but knew it was still missing out on potential online sales. The company turned to iCrossing to boost qualified traffic to RestorationHardware.com, improve online conversion rates and raise site visibility across the leading search engines.
Over the eight months of a natural search optimization development by iCrossing that preceded the initial first-quarter results, the search marketing firm identified areas for immediate improvement. Among them, search engine spiders were facing unintended obstacles when attempting to crawl relevant pages of the site. At the same time, spiders that crawled non-essential pages of the site risked diluting the link popularity of the site’s key category and product pages. In addition, there was no customer-facing site map on the site, and the navigation structure wasn’t optimized.
To address these issues, iCrossing recommended and developed a simple text-driven site map, with organized hyperlinks to every page in the web site. To improve navigation, a text link to the sitemap was placed within the footer of each page on the site. In addition, it implemented robot.txt files on non-essential pages of the site to block search engine spiders from crawling those pages and instead redirected them to more relevant pages on the site.
Within the first quarter of implementation, RestorationHardware.com saw a sizeable increase in naturally-driven search traffic and conversion. In addition to more than doubling its conversions for non-branded search terms, the site saw visitors coming to the site from natural search actually converting at a rate of 40% higher than the paid search visitors. And in keeping with its objective of raising RestorationHardware.com’s visibility across the major search engines, conversion rates and traffic from AOL, Yahoo, and Google increased steadily through the quarter, iCrossing reports.
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