Championing Redesign: Built From An SEO Perspective

Overview: Jet Dock

Just a few months after an SEO/redesign project, visitors from search engines are up significantly - nearly 90% (during the off season). (See Figure 1)

Figure 1

This case study is examining the progress of a client, Jet Dock, which needed to revamp its web-base image by overhauling the current website with an entirely fresh and new design. The original Jet Dock site was not built in a user-friendly manner and the site's infrastructure was not laid out efficiently for search engine optimization. (See Figure 2)

Figure 2

Content is widely regarded as "king" within the search engine optimization realm. The Jet Dock content was choppy and limited, making it exceptionally difficult to optimize for target keywords and phrases. The site lacked aesthetic appeal, with long scrolling pages that were difficult to navigate.

Jet Dock was looking to move to a sleeker, more modern, user-friendly web experience. The challenge that Jet Dock could see on the horizon, however, was maintaining the solid rankings it held over the three main search engines for key terms vital to the industry. The most logical approach to conquering both of these titans was laying the framework for a new site with SEO techniques in mind. By creating a site that was optimized while being built, the transition was able to support the high rankings of the old site.

Employing proper 301 redirects and effective sitemaps were other necessary steps to effectively launch the reenergized www.jetdock.com. The original Jet Dock website was coded entirely in .asp. The newly designed site was built primarily in .shtml with data-basing components in an .asp model. The sitemap and 301 redirects were essential to aiding the search engine robots in identifying the proper pages to cache. 301 redirects assure that search engine robots find content moved to new pages in a website redesign.

Accomplishments: Jet Dock Success

Jet Dock results include an increase in search engine traffic in every month from the launch of the new site. Historically, Jet Dock's traffic overall takes a hit during the winter months, known as its off-season. Once the new site was implemented live, however, those "normal" months where the traffic usually dwindles actually provided search engine traffic growth. Search engine traffic for Jet Dock increased by 13.9% after four months of implemented updates during the "down season." ClickTracks¹ reported an increase from 11,450 search engine visitors in September 2006 to 13,036 search engine visitors for December 2006. As of January 20, 2007, the December numbers have already been surpassed (21,587). (See Figure 1)

The keyword phrase "boat lifts" is the number-one priority for Jet Dock's search engine optimization campaign. The Jet Dock site held the eighth spot on Google™, the 27th position on MSN®, and no ranking position in the top 100 for Yahoo!®. When analyzing the ranking reports for Jet Dock for December 2006 after the redesign, Jet Dock was able to maintain the ninth position for that competitive industry term on Google™, as well as improve its ranking on MSN® to ninth and Yahoo!® to the eighth spot. (See Figure 3) A number of other keyword phrases on Jet Dock's official keyword list in its SEO program held the first and second positions. (See Figure 4)

Figure 3

¹ ClickTracks - Analytic software used by Fathom SEO in measuring overall traffic and trends.

Figure 4

Jet Dock's official keywords had 104 top 10 rankings across the big three search engines in September 2006 before the redesign was launched live. At the end of December 2006, Fathom SEO had boosted Jet Dock's top 10 rankings to 137. These results included the increase of 29 first-place rankings to a whopping 42 first-place rankings, and a growth of 44.8%. (See Figure 5) Jet Dock's rankings not only maintained strength, but greatly improved with stronger top page rankings and multiple pages for the same keyword phrase.

Figure 5