Pine-Oak Furniture Case Study
The Client
Pine-Oak Furniture is a business based in Herfordshire that retails wooden furniture via an online shop and a high street retail presence.
The Brief
Pine-Oak became a client of I-COM in 2009. They had previously employed a separate web design and marketing agencies with limited success.
Traffic had grown slightly but the slightly busier site did not compensate for the harsh economic climate and sales were down.
The challenge for I-COM was to help the business perform more effectively and deliver higher sales.
The Solution
Our initial evaluation of the Pine-Oak Furniture site revealed a site that was relatively poorly designed - the site felt cluttered, the navigation was difficult and the styling of the site did not enhance confidence in the brand. We felt that this might be hindering conversions.
In addition there were a number of technical issues that prevented effective optimisation, there was a lot of duplicate content and a history of poor (and slightly suspect) optimisation.
To help resolve the issues we re-designed the user interface of the site to give a cleaner and more reputable feel to the site. We also worked on the navigation restructuring the site for ease of navigation and creating new meaningful landing pages for paid search campaigns.
From a search perspective we revised the way the site worked to eliminate duplicate content issues, we then focussed on adding and improving category level site copy and meta data to get the site into better shape.
Off site we worked to have bad links removed as we were concerned the site was being penalised as a result of its questionable link profile. Finally when all the initial remediatory work was completed we contacted Google to inform them that the site had turned over a new leaf and was now following their webmaster guidelines.
The old Pine-Oak Furniture site was cluttered and not intuitive for users.
The re-designed Pine-Oak site is much simpler and whilst the range of products is now even wider the navigation structure prevents the user from being overwhelmed by too much choice.
The Results
Eventually we began to make progress; the results and effect on the business have been dramatic. Last year, despite the poor economy, the site had achieved the previous year's sales by September.
We continue to work with Pine-Oak enhancing the site, as well as providing search engine optimisation and pay-per-click managements services.
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