Case Study

Sentinel Storm Protection

Provides a full range of hurricane protection products.
Service available for Collier, Lee and Sarasota Counties.

Document Number: 20028
Client Contact Name: Mike Marczak
Title: President
Date of service: 2002 to present

Disclaimer:

The information in this document number: 20028 is proprietary to Sentinel Storm Protection. This information is not intended for reproduction, copy or any form of distribution. The information is intellectual property that is not intended to be viewed or talked about to any competing company that sells or installs hurricane-based products. All rights are reserved and all information in this document belongs strictly to Internet Marketing Logic, Inc.

Case Study:
Sentinel Storm Protection

Sentinel Storm Protection was a start up company. The president had previously managed a hurricane shutter and installation company.

Summary:

In the fall of 2002, Mike Marczak came into our advertising agency (Wise and Time Advertising, Inc.) expressing a need for a full logo and branding campaign. He also understood the need for a new website and good Internet marketing for his new website.

Our advertising agency provided everything he needed in way of branding. Mike and I sat down to talk about his needs for a good online strategy. We discovered that the local market was flooded with both local and national online competitors selling all forms of hurricane products. We would have to optimize better than all of the other competitors do or we would not perform well when people search for hurricane products.

We took the time to observe what our local competitors were doing online. We also copied and archived all competitors websites.

I used some online tools offered by Trellian to count the number of competing websites. We could see the number of websites that had Naples and hurricane shutters in the meta part of the source code. This gives us a good idea of the number of competing sites in Collier County. I did the same in Lee and Sarasota counties.

Mike and I both agreed that if we expected to get a return on our online investment, we would really have to optimize better than everyone else.

Problem:

The main issue we faced was the competition of websites. We also had to deal with the fact that we are a newly formed company and we intend to get better rankings than websites that have been around for a much longer time than ours.

Another problem that we discovered was the Naples Daily News and the Sarasota News had PDF articles posted online for hurricane preparation and hurricane related topics. These were archived and host on their servers and they came up strong for most top positions.

Big sites like the Newspapers, Chamber of Commerce and the CBIA (Collier Building Industry Association) all hold top positions where we wanted our site to be.

Objectives:

We need to do everything right and by the book! We need to be optimized better and offer better content to a crawler. We will have to get creative with a linking program and a way that we can get visitors to our site. Getting new IP’s (Internet Protocol or unique visitors) to our site will be our secret weapon to our competitors.

Here is a list of items we will need to work on:

1. A good keyword strategy
2. Well written text
3. A great linking program
4. A method to get visitors to our site
5. Optimize better than the best
6. Submit to all main directories
7. Include a comprehensive Yellow Page Index program

Attack:

Our site was created without any dynamic fields. We made the site all HTML with heavy keyword weight in the first 250 characters on all of our landing pages.
The client mentioned that the engineers in Collier county always requested mechanical engineered blue prints of each product so they can specify the shutter and include the engineered drawing when they submit the home for permitting. We decided to include all 200-engineered drawings in downloadable format for the engineers to access from our site.

I created a microsite that included an optimized version of the clients website. The optimized version would automatically and seamlessly resolve to the clients main site. The placement of the downloadable PDF’s gave me a way to both optimize the PDF's and get unique visitors to the site.

Results:

After one year, the results were good but not quite a return on the client's investment.
The second year was much better offering 200 leads with a 60% conversion ratio. (1,700 profit on average sale)
When we went into the hurricane season of 2004 – 2006, his online profits paid off. He held the number one position for all hurricane key words and consistently gets over 600 leads per year with over a 70% conversion ratio.

Today he still holds a number one position for hurricane products and he caps at a little over 600 online forms filled out for a quote.

Upon Request:

• A current ranking report (This shows his keyword strategy along with how his words are ranked on the top search engines)
• A letter of recommendation from this client