Case Studies
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Budget Bath is a Baltimore-area Bathroom remodeling company, run by the typical business owner who knows exactly how to do his job – bathrooms, in this case – but not how to work the marketing opportunities on the internet. Dave House, the owner, was paying through the nose for a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign that he did not understand, and did not generate any leads for him. He was ripped off again and again by companies that took his money and did not help to grow his business. When we took over Dave’s marketing, his website went from having generated exactly one lead in an entire year, to three leads each week. After implementing our own PPC campaign and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) system, his site went from having no traffic at all, to being the number one hit for Baltimore bathroom remodeling. He is now the owner of a two million dollar per year company. Dave has been our SEO client for three years, and has only increased his requests for services. We are working on the third redesign of his website and we supported his internet marketing successfully – he has just won Angie’s List “Super Service Award” for the third year in a row. Many of his leads are a direct traffic-increase result of our SEO services, and fully 99% of his leads are from the internet. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) As soon as we fixed his website, he immediately began getting more leads, and less than two months later, he had achieved his full goal of a 9:1 return on investment ratio. At most, Adam now pays $2 - $3 dollars per click, we are working on upping his return on investment every day. For Parkville Automotive, we occasionally posted a deal on an oil change to keep the monetary value going for the customers, but mostly we aimed for the entertainment and educational values that the business’s Facebook page could provide. We posted informative articles about the dangers of hydroplaning. We also posted some funny car-related photos and invited the fans to come up with their own captions, which initiated the monthly “Caption Contest.”
Adam Roa is a Baltimore area elder law attorney who was paying another company $11 per click for a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) service. He was wasting thousands of dollars and not generating many leads. Only one year ago, he reached out to us to take over his PPC service to see how to increase his leads.
We built his campaign around the niche areas of his expertise: trusts and wills, probates, and nursing home cases. He hoped to achieve a 9:1 return on investment ratio. By the end of the first six months, we had him at 7:1. Close, but no cigar… yet.
Adam then asked us to take a look at his website, which another company had designed. We did a full website audit using analytic software, and discovered that 15% of his visitors went straight from his home page to his contact page. And on his contact page, he had no phone number listed. Such a simple omission, and yet it had cost him a countless amount of business.
Social Media
Parkville Automotive is run by a heck of a businessman and a team of talented mechanics. Who asked any of them to also be brilliant marketers? The owner, Tony Ricutti, tried though. He posted constant Facebook statuses on the business’s fan page advertising – always in all caps – “SPECIAL ON OIL CHANGES, COME GET AN OIL CHANGE.”
Why weren’t the customers flocking to him in droves?
When we first took a look at Tony’s Facebook page for his business, he had between 80 and 90 fans on Facebook, and none of his efforts on Facebook resulted in a single penny of business. His heart was in the right place, but he was essentially wasting his time – and wearing out the caps lock button.
We took over the Parkville Automotive Facebook page and gave it a complete overhaul. We added a splash page, a new profile image, and a total redesign, rebuilding it from ground up. We started posting twice a week, using a strategy for posts that covered the various reasons why a customer might be a fan of theirs on Facebook. Their Facebook page had to be a source of value to their customers.
There are really no more than three or four reasons why a Facebooker might click “like” on a business, and keep up with the business’s posts in a news feed.
Parkville Automotive currently has 400 fans on Facebook, and business has increased 80% for Tony. In fact, Facebook generated a lead that resulted in a “fleet account” – Parkville Automotive is now responsible for the maintenance of every vehicle used by a local chimney sweep company.
People who have cars have a common interest – we capitalized on that interest on Parkville Automotive’s Facebook page.
Logo Design & Graphics
We’re not grabby – Dan Cenidoza can tell you that. He’s the owner of Art & Strength, a Perry Hall strength training studio. He wanted a friend of his to design the logo for his brand new business, and that was fine with us.
We gave Dan our input into the logo design and helped him choose what artistic elements it should incorporate. Once his friend was done with the design, we ran with it. We designed Art & Strength’s grand opening flyer around the logo, and we also designed the company’s website and Facebook page, both of which incorporated it.
We share credit well.
Dan supplied the initial photographs which we used in his website design, but we provided a photographer at his grand opening and several events since, to continue to generate graphics for his sites.
We also incorporated a QR code on his Art & Strength flyers – a QR code is a two dimensional bar code that folks with a smart phone can scan and be taken straight to a company’s Facebook page, and “like” it instantly. It’s a good way to be reminded, when you get home and log on to Facebook, of the business you happened to pass while you were out walking, and thought to scan its QR code.
Following a business’s Facebook page can be stronger than checking out its website. Facebook, by nature of its real-time posts and news feeds, creates a long-term client interaction, where clients are reminded of your company every day, or every two days, or every week. A relationship can develop between clients and the business, with posting and commenting and personal touches like photos. That relationship brings folks in the door when they need your service.
Web Design
Check out the Art and Strength website – we designed it and it’s one of our favorites. But this story is about Fast Track Physical Therapy, a New Jersey physical therapy company whose website we also designed.
Fast Track Physical Therapy’s website is very professional but also a little flashy. We dig it. Some of its drop-down menus are a bit slick, and we’re pretty happy with the result.
The website was custom-built on a content management system called JOOMLA! It’s easy to use and highly customizable. We included every feature that Kevin Laser, the owner, wanted – he’s got a blog, downloadable patient forms, an online patient satisfaction survey, a photo gallery for community events, and interactive testimonial pages. The site also includes a ton of basic content, like staff bios, insurance information, a FAQ, and integration with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Nothing we say here can toot our own horn better than visiting the website yourself. Have a click (http://fasttrackptnj.com/) and check it out.
Joint Venture
A joint venture for us at Ascension Advertising, together with a favorite client, was born from a regular SEO job.
Carroll Landscaping hired us to improve their Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As a landscaping company, they were going to have a lot of internet competition with other similar companies when folks type “landscaping” into a search engine.
So optimizing their search engine results was going to take some time. We decided to create a second site called the Landscaping Wizard, and have the professionals at Carroll Landscaping write lots of detailed, informative articles that are very educational in nature. We were shooting for a “high authority” website, which internet surfers far and wide could come to when they searched for the phrase “landscaping ideas.”
Eventually, once the Landscaping Wizard site was established, it would be easy to link it to Carroll Landscaping’s own site, and they could piggyback off of their own expertise.
The Landscaping Wizard site, however, as it becomes a more and more high-traffic site, became an ideal site for advertisers to post their ads. Right now the site sees 103,000 individual people each month who have searched for the phrase “landscaping ideas” and clicked on Landscaping Wizard. Advertising created a new potential revenue stream for Carroll Landscaping.
Ascension Advertising gets a cut of the ad sales on Landscaping Wizard, and Carroll Landscaping gets the lion’s share. We’re both making money in tandem from the ad sales on the site, and the traffic on the site is only improving Carroll’s SEO ranking.
A win win, indeed.
