Search Engine Optimization- Example A

I am working with a very small t-shirt company, Client T, on improving their ranking in the search engines.

There are t-shirt companies that work out of a warehouse and have hundreds of designs. The quantity of t-shirt companies is large. Google "tees" and you get 28 million results, "t-shirt" brings back 151 million! Sure, not every result is an individual t-shirt company, but the competition is huge. How can a small company compete with these guys?

Background
Client T uses sweatshop-free tees, hand-printed work, and works from her home. The quality of the tees she provides are second to none. She is able to communicate directly to customers or anyone with a question.

Budget
Like a lot of small businesses, the budget for web site changes, marketing, seo, was small. She makes all website changes herself. She found she was losing the most money on website changes- she would have to sell 5 tees per every website change she had just to break even.

Goal
Currently she sells some tees through a local store, and has not had much success selling online. Too hard to find her through the large selection of tees. Her goal for the next month is to increase her search engine ranking, and to sell more tees online.

Strategy
Taking inventory on current ranking in the search engines for the keywords she associated with her site. In a spreadsheet, I put the date and ranking. We would update this each week, hoping to see some improvement.

Process
I take her goals and come up with a marketing strategy. Once she approves of the goals, the process is implemented.

Status
After a week- Improvement in Google for some keywords! This is with only 2 of her pages optimimized. I have given her the direction to optimize, but she needs to make the pages "live". Once all of the pages are reformatted, I expect even more traffic. Very slight improvement in traffic to her site. She was getting hardly any traffic, so now she has some to work with. This is encouraging.

Action Items
She needs to finish publishing the pages (remember- this was her choice so as to save money, but I put the optimization in the pages, she uploads the right images and then makes it live). Once these are live, we will move on to Social Networking.

I will update the blog on her improved search engine status a week from when she has all the pages live.


My traditional marketing experience