Objective: Ryson International, a manufacturer of spiral conveyors, needed a way to boost its search engine visibility to expose its equipment to more potential customers.
Strategy: The company hired search engine firm ProspectMX, which conducted keyword research and implemented a link-building program to increase natural and universal search rankings. It also created authority pages and increased Ryson's social presence to boost brand visibility.
Results: The company was able to increase search visibility by 263% and organic search engine traffic to the site by 117% between January 2010 and 2011.
In January 2010 Ryson International, a Yorktown, Va.-based manufacturer of spiral conveyors, was doing well in its rankings for the term “spiral conveyor,” landing near the top of Google's search results. There was a problem, however, said Ken Rygh, the company's marketing manager. “The equipment we manufacture is called by many different names,” he said. “They are called anything from case elevators to lowerators to vertical incline conveyors. There's no one word for all distributors.” And unfortunately, Ryson wasn't doing as well on those other keyword phrases.
Meanwhile, its universal search rankings were “OK,” but again, only with that one particular keyword. “We had our videos posted on [b2b supplier search site] Kellysearch.com and other industrial catalogs, so we were getting some video to show up in universal search through association with them,” Rygh said.
Hoping to boost its search rankings in both natural and universal search, Ryson in April 2010 hired ProspectMX, a search marketing company based in Lancaster, Pa. The project started with keyword research to see how Ryson customers and prospects were searching for products. ProspectMX tapped keyword research tools such as Wordtracker and Google AdWords as well as its own in-house solutions.
Then, the company helped create authority pages (pages fully optimized for the keyword silos for which the website is trying to rank) within Ryson's website that could include relevant product keywords and also did on-page optimization. For example, one of the internal pages that ProspectMX optimized was Ryson's Bucket Elevators link.
Finally, the company executed a link-building campaign and started optimizing Ryson's social networking campaigns, which had been in place previously but had not been taken full advantage of, Rygh said. Ryson's executives did some guest blogging, released some press releases and expanded the company's presence on packaging industry directory sites.
Guest blogging posts, in particular, expanded Ryson's universal reach because they appeared on green-related sites, an angle the company had not previously pursued. “Spiral conveyors are greener than incline conveyors, and we were able to get that information out via blogs,” said Jonathan Bentz, director of client marketing at ProspectMX. The company also started optimizing Ryson's own blog, which is updated weekly.
While SEO is not an immediate fix, Ryson started seeing results in three to four months, with the “bucket elevators” search term taking off first, Bentz said. Today, the company averages 22 goal conversions per month. In addition, since starting the campaign, Ryson has obtained more than 600 high-quality back links and increased search visibility by 263%. “We're doing very well across the board when it comes to search results,” Rygh said.
