Yesterday evening I received an email from one of our customers, Angel Barclay. It's always great to hear from the people we work with, but this letter really made me smile.
Angel runs the Angels Attic Designs website, which sells collectible art and holiday decorations. In her email she explains how using Wordtracker's Keywords tool has helped reduce pay per click (PPC) costs by 66% and, in just one year, doubled organic traffic to her site. Which is pretty impressive.
I've recreated her letter below, so that you can see how she achieved this remarkable feat. I've also added links to useful content for those who want to investigate further:
Hi Justin,
I am the owner/CEO of Angel's Attic Designs Inc as well as the webmaster, QuickBooks bookkeeper, sales & marketing manager, purchasing manager, Corel PaintShop Photo Pro expert, SEO guru, etc. and my husband, Steve, is the manager of shipping & receiving.
I started the company in June 2006 and hired a firm to create my website. By August of 2008, I still did not have a website, my budget was almost depleted and I was about ready to give up. Then I found Network Solutions. Steve and I (having no clue about what we were doing) quickly built the site and launched it in November 2008 just in time for the Christmas season.
We were amazed that people started coming to our site and making purchases. We did about 30 orders and were very impressed with ourselves. Starting in January 2009, we did a few more orders but by September we had no orders. We couldn't understand what had happened. Then a friend with a website called and asked when was the last time we had sent a product feed to Google. Our reply was "yes, we did that back in November when we brought the site online." After five minutes of hysterical laughter, our friend explained about product feeds and keywords. She recommended a site called Wordtracker. I immediately went to your site and signed up for the free 7 day trial which I then extended for a short time to a monthly subscription. I was a bit confused in the beginning because I was unfamiliar with the terminology. So I started purchasing your books about keyword research and Google PPC. In October 2009 I started my first PPC campaign.
Then Christmas 2009 season arrived and we did about 150 orders. We were very busy so I cancelled my Wordtracker keyword subscription temporarily. My PPC campaign brought most of the traffic that Christmas but the cost was astounding.
Around March 2010 I decided to get really serious about SEO. I bought all your books and started studying. It made a lot more sense the second time so I reactivated the keyword tool subscription and started changing the ad-copy and implementing what I hadlearned. It is a slow process but the results have been incredible. My PPC costs have decreased 66% and my organic visits have increased 200%. We processed over 600 orders during the Christmas 2010 season.
I got a lot of valuable information from Karon Thackston's book, "Ecommerce Copywriting Proven Strategies for Boosting Sales & Search Rankings" It teaches so much more than just keyword research. I still have a lot of work to do but at least now I'm on the right track thanks to you guys. Keep up the good work and keep those books coming.
Many thanks,
Angel Barclay
Angel's Attic Designs Inc
972 754-0277
Angel@AngelsAtticDesigns.com
FYI: Before I started my company, I was a programmer and instructor at Sabre, Inc for about 8 years of which 3.5 of them were at their UK office in Hounslow. Little of that experience prepared me for SEO!
Congratulations Angel! Growing a business from 30 Christmas orders in 2008 to more than 600 in 2010 is a fantastic effort. And just reward for all that hard work.
If you'd like to find out how keyword research can help double your website traffic, take a free 7-day trial of Wordtracker's Keywords tool. You've nothing to lose, as we have a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Or if you've used Wordtracker's tools to help grow your business, please let us know below. We'd love to hear your story.
