Search Engine Optimization
Charleston.com
Problem
Charleston.com needed to develop a strategy to maximize organic search engine results. Charleston.com is a portal site to the Charleston area and was not ranking highly in the search engines even though the site offered more content and more relevant information to users seeking information on the area.
Result
Charleston.com is now in the top rankings for Google and Yahoo! under the main 16 keywords/phrases that were selected with the client. They have a 6/10 PageRank, ranked as 170,643 by Alexa and have 63,244 overall incoming links.
With optimizations to the home page and all lower level pages individually, Charleston.com was able to obtain premium, native search engine ranking for the top search terms.
Insight
Charleston.com has a wealth of content for a user seeking out information; however it is located within the site in areas dedicated to travel, weddings, golf, real estate, vacations and more. The search engines were only looking at the first few pages, completely missing the most important content.
Strategy
Our search engine optimization (SEO) program was able to individually code and optimize the home page and all lower level pages on Charleston.com. This results in the search engines scanning and ranking the lower, content rich, pages. For example, when a user searches for "Charleston Oceanfront Real Estate," Charleston.com is the first site they will see. More importantly, the user will be able to click directly to the real estate page.
Example
"Charleston, SC" was the highest searched term for the area at over 180,000 searches since May, 2007, followed by "Charleston" at over 160,000 searches. "Charleston, SC" and "Charleston" have a bid price of $0.91 and $1.02 respectively on a pay-per-click basis. Charleston.com was able to save approximately $32,980 on their PPC budget by having a strong search engine optimization program. This is based on receiving approximately 10% of traffic from these keyword searches through native search results instead of pay-per-click results. Charleston.com's search engine optimization costs are only a small fraction of what a pure PPC program would have cost.
