BACKGROUND
Since 1979, Sweetwater has been committed to giving music makers the ultimate shopping experience. As a pioneer of ecommerce in the early '90s, Sweetwater has methodically leveraged the Internet to expand the business. As a result, Sweetwater.com now serves as the #1 online retail destination for music gear in the United States. Whether it's Sweetwater's human approach to building personal relationships with their customers, the numerous free value-adds, or their unparalleled "too-good-to-be-true" customer service, Sweetwater.com continues to be the preferred shopping destination for music makers — beginner and rock star alike.
THE SOLUTION
With over 30,000 products and more than 125,000 pages on Sweetwater's website, page taxonomy, navigation, and site search help connect Sweetwater customers to products that meet their needs. Sam Dickinson, Sweetwater's Data Strategy and Analytics Manager, leverages the BrightEdge SEO platform to organize Sweetwater content for both customers and search crawlers. Organic search is one of Sweetwater's largest sources of traffic, so gains in SEO have a profound impact on the business as a whole.
Three Technical Solutions
Taxonomy – Sam and the Sweetwater Content Team (led by Jon Schafer) identified high-potential concepts using BrightEdge Data Cube and BrightEdge Ignite Analysis, reorganizing Sweetwater.com content to better align with search behavior. BrightEdge served as an objective reporting source while Sam and the Sweetwater Web Team (led by Josh Gustin) rolled the resulting SEO-optimized internal linking strategy out across Sweetwater.com.
Pagination – Sam noticed individual component pages of multi-page categories competing for SERP placements in his BrightEdge reporting and worked alongside the Sweetwater Web Team to establish rel="next" and rel="prev" relationships for all multi-page Sweetwater.com results, eliminating competition between individual parts of a single concept.
Prioritization – BrightEdge continues to provide the SERP context necessary to prioritize Sweetwater.com organic search concepts via Data Cube and tracked keywords as well as the long-term SERP and site structure reporting with which Sam gauges the success of his modifications via ContentIQ and StoryBuilder.
RESULTS
Comparing Project Start to End:
- +63% Sweetwater.com Page 1 Ranked Organic Keywords
- +39% Sweetwater.com Overall Ranked Organic Keywords
- +38% Sweetwater.com Organic Search Assisted Transactions
- +20% Sweetwater.com New Organic Sessions