Success Story: Trying on new keywords for size helped this Chicago baby boutique increase sales
Background
Lollie, as in “pop,” is a children’s and baby boutique located in Evanston, IL. The business originally opened in 2003, and the mother-daughter duo of Cheryl Del Campo and Alexis Del Campo Eyler took ownership in 2010. As a local, independently owned business, the Evanston children's boutique is focused on the Chicagoland community, but now, thanks to DIYSEO, has an expanding clientele-base due to the increased visibility of its e-commerce website.
Goals
After Lollie changed ownership, Del Campo and Eyler wanted to create a new website because they felt their e-commerce store needed to be more scalable. The business launched a new site in late 2010, but soon found out the endeavor required more maintenance than originally anticipated.
Previously, store product changes had to be manually updated on the website. Even though the new point of sales system created a more automated and efficient process, they soon discovered that their SEO work from the original domain became lost, and online sales were no longer occurring.
“Until DIYSEO came along, the cost of an SEO consultant was astronomical and made no sense to the business,” Eyler said. “We hoped to find someone out there to tell us exactly what we needed to do so that we could complete the process on our own. Finding DIYSEO was exactly what we were looking for.”
DIYSEO was Eyler’s first experience with search engine marketing. She hoped to see a sales increase on the lollie website, as well as more search engine visibility with their keyword rankings. In addition, the small business considered its competitors a large hurdle.
Results
Since joining DIYSEO in January 2011, lollie’s conversion rate has seen a positive upswing. After only a couple months, the site went from earning zero online profit to receiving an increasing number of conversions per week.
“We’re not trying to become Amazon, but its nice to have new customers come into the store. And that added boost of weekly web sales is a big plus,” Eyler said.
In addition, lollie instantly jumped from ranking above 100 in Google to sitting in the top spot for their various keyword rankings.
Eyler talked about how keyword rankings are an essential part in lollie’s SEO success, “DIYSEO really helped us to optimize our site and rebuild our link-building keywords. Identifying the right keywords and their best locations on our site is tremendously valuable. We initially focused on keywords that included only the location of Evanston. Although Evanston is a large city, DIYSEO assisted us in re-evaluating our site and suggested we extend our target audience keywords to Chicago. Our top keyword rankings have made a huge difference.”
Discussing her Chicago baby store competitors, she said, “Now we are competing with Chicago boutiques, so that changes the game a bit. However, Chicago opened up a whole new opportunity to expand our customer base. We’ve learned that while many sites have been around longer, everyone is in the same boat as we are in terms of needing to constantly work on their SEO process. Most owner-operated businesses don’t have a lot of familiarity with SEO, so it’s comforting to know that we can spend time on this and build an advantage.”
“My advice to small businesses that are beginning to delve into SEO is that it takes time to build a good website. It can take a good 6 months to start seeing real site traffic. You have to dedicate time to working on the business's SEO, there’s no other way around it.”
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