White Hat Holsters Increased Sales By 100% in 1 Year Through SEO

About White Hat Holsters

White Hat Holsters was a producer of some of the best concealed carry holsters and Holster accessories available, fully customizable to specifications. It has some self invented accessories named like Max tuck and Micro Tuck. It has also produced few others accessories like Gun Belts, Hat, Shirts, screw and clips. It was producing holsters for weapon in a custom design.

White Hat Holsters’ Business Objectives

The company’s objective was to increase traffic and thus sales. In order to increase traffic and sales, a need of exposure was required for White Hat Holster. As The Owner Tony Farah said..

 “I just knew we had to get more visible because if you searched for hybrid holsters, we weren’t on the radar. There was nothing there that would direct customers to us.”

Since the company’s website was optimized for the keywords that have been created and ranging around company-created brand names, the website was optimized majorly around these terms which was not actually a generic search terms for gun holster as a new user since the new user would not be typing Max Tuck or Micro Tuck into His/her search tool. It was not attracting new base of users towards its website which resulted into repeated buying from old loyal customer only.

Strategy Adopted By White Hat Holsters

In order to gain a prominent place on Google Index, White Hat Holsters optimized its website around the keywords which are more generic for the user against its own generated branded keywords. Additionally, it went back to basics of SEO. It’s strategy was based upon four key parameters:

• Discover and research generic and prominent keyword: As a process, their search first and foremost started with the best relevant and generic keyword that White Hat Holsters could work with. It has been achieved by the assistance of-
  • Keyword, SEO and search engine ranking tools
  • Competitive Research

White Hat Holsters then associated with an outside vendor who would be supplying a compiled preliminary list of guided keywords which have been most prominent to be used by the nascent searching for a holster. Those keywords then put into tools to deliver a list of relevant keywords which ultimately then narrowed down to quality and non-branded terms. Although the terms and keywords were not too highly competitive but simultaneously the same could deliver a substantial amount of organic traffic. Above all, the list of keywords which was prepared, were those keywords which were most likely used by the potential customer to whom White Hat Holsters was struggling to reach.

• Review the site structure: Once the list was ready, second step was to determine where and how to implement within the website. It was required to be done post carefully reviewing the structure of the existing website including page name as title including the location of those page. Existing pages of the website which was pinned with the branded names that White Holsters Created (Max Tuck, Base Max etc.) was also optimized around those relevant terms. As White Hat Holsters was not in a need of new website since it already posses the full fledged website so an inspection was done in order to see how the same existing website could be optimized in order to save time and effort both. Also it was ideal too, to focus on optimizing within the existing structure rather starting from scratch. Additionally Vendor of White Hat Holsters scrapped few onsite elements like Meta Description Tags, Image Alt Tags, URL Pages Titles and heading that was being used for SEO in existing website with the assistance of SEO Spider Tool. In order to make SEO examination efficient, the URL was submitted into the crawler which acts as a tool to create a spreadsheet of data divided into tabs and filters.

• Optimizing on-site elements with findings: With the result in place, next step was to implement all those required changes into the pages of website ensuring minimal or negligible hamper to the current structure of website. Ladder by ladder on-site elements of the website were optimized to target high traffic keywords. Subsequently, while dealing with the keywords that had been whittled down, it is desirable not to stuff the website at the risk of raising the suspicion of search engine and discomforting the potential customer. In order to address the issue, White Hat Holsters agreed to use three to five keyword phrase to target per page that included assigning the keywords to different pages and tweaking of title tags, image alt tags, page titles, heading and other elements. While optimizing the content it was also advised to focus on the area above fold and to use ideal word count of 500-1,000 words in this area of page and it is required to implement best keyword while employing the word count to further excel in SEO. It involved the writing of the content that contains not only those targeted keyword but also it appears more appealing and offered value to White Hat Holsters.

• Create a blog to engage customers: While company goal was to increase sales by reaching its untapped customers, interacting with its customer base remained at its heart. In order to engage customers, a way was to create a blog. It will not only benefit in building relationship with customers but also to appeal to search engine spiders as well. The creation of blog helped in furnishing fresh content to website on regular basis which is very important from an SEO standpoint which invites search engine to index it. The blog engage customers as it encourages them to share their stories and experience related to brand. Blog also helped in incorporating those longer and more specific keyword to pull that traffic who were using long tail keyword.

“I feel like the blog posts are really an opportunity for us to communicate more intimately with the   customers and get them involved, too,” Farah Said.

He additionally emphasized on using blog than Facebook and Twitter as it is an area where the brand can       showcase what it values while initiating conversation with the customer that actually integrated with the website.

Result Achieved by White Hat Holsters

The efforts that were put in into the campaign were extremely fruitful. The newly structured website attracted more visitors through organic search and kept them engaged and visits increased from 2000 to 8000 (400% increase in traffic) over eight months period. It then resulted into 100% increase in sales over a one-year period.

Learnings

World in getting competitive day-by-day that is inviting new technology, new products in our vicinity. Although we are making loyal customers but challenge is to acquire new Market and new potential customer. At the same time, use familiar words to attracts new visitors. Same reflected in the case of White Hat Holsters. While it was experiencing repeated buying from the pre-existing customers as they were aware with the jargon, potential customer not so it was losing huge base of potential customers. So using keywords smartly, keep the customers engaged, attracting new sets of customers are the perquisites of growing the business.

Image credit: White Hat Holsters