The customer
Muddy Paws specialises in selling top quality dogs and puppies products that include dog beds, baskets, collars and coats. Offering superb quality, great looking products that represent excellent value for money, www.muddypaws.co.uk web shop has been built on a platform of first class customer service that guarantees a speedy response from a friendly team who are as passionate about dogs as their customers.
Owned by husband and wife team and based in the Dorest countryside, Muddypaws is an ecommerce website that relies on the attraction of like-minded dog lovers looking online for canine related products and sundries for the UK’s 4 million dogs.
The challenge
Using the website as their shop front, Muddypaws owners Rupert and Emma Brown understood that maximising the impact of their online marketing was essential for the promotion and attraction of customers looking for dog and puppy related products online.
The UK is home to over 4 million dogs and with over 3.5 million searches conducted in the UK a year for dog supplies*, the public loves to treat their canine pals. For an ecommerce website operating in a highly competitive environment, Muddypaws had to use every possible technique to dominate search for the market.
They began with pay per click (PPC) marketing to drive new business through the website. Rupert explains;
‘We led our online marketing with PPC as we thought it would be the most effective route to attract prospective web customers. The results were reasonable, but it became apparent our website needed some attention to really maximise the benefit of the efforts we were putting into PPC.’
Rupert and Emma soon realised the best way to achieve the growth the business needed was to outsource their PPC management and integrate that with search engine optimisation (SEO).
Rupert said;
‘I understood the principles of SEO and knew that it was an effective online marketing tool which could improve the levels of traffic to our website through natural search rankings. I was also aware that the any SEO we did would support our offline marketing, advertising and editorial Public Relations.’
Conducting a review of the SEO marketplace, Muddypaws soon identified the decision criteria for a provider.
‘PPC was performing reasonably for us given that I managed it through Google. We were spending the money but there was plenty I didn’t understanding about the process and it became clear that this was inhibiting us from achieving the results we really wanted. For better results we knew we would be better off engaging a professional who could really drive the campaigns.
We received twelve quotes that varied so greatly in cost it rapidly became apparent that price wasn’t as much of an indicator of service and deliverables as we first thought. Instead, given the wide range of responses, prices and service levels we were being offered, we determined that our key decision maker had to be based on trust and accountability.
At the outset I knew I wanted to work with a company I liked. From my first enquiry into Vertical Leap, they behaved professionally. I received the right information and assurance for service levels from both the company themselves and the existing Vertical Leap customers I spoke with.’
Our strategy
For the SEO and PPC campaigns, we focused on a number of top selling products to determine the most effective keywords to deliver organic rankings. A core keyword was ‘dog beds’, a very competitive search term for which there is an estimated 266,400 searches a year in the UK.
Our work combined full optimsation of www.muddypaws.co.uk to make sure the site had quality content, good structure and was visible to the search engines with highly focused ad creation and careful budget management. This integrated approach meant that Muddypaws would cover as much of the available market as possible through both organic and paid listings, and generate customers to the website at the purchase point of the buying cycle.
The results
Muddypaws has seen significant benefits from the introduction of comprehensive search engine marketing into its marketing strategy.
- 700% increase in web traffic from search engines
- Top ranking on Google for primary keyword ‘dog beds’
- 600% increase in web traffic from search engines search on ‘dog beds’
- An increase in total web traffic of 200%.
Rupert reports;
‘The traffic from our ‘dog beds’ keyword now represents over half of the traffic to our website. This knowledge means we have been able to increase the amount of attention and importance we place on this product on our website. In turn, this gives us greater credibility as primary supplier of quality dog beds in the UK which drives us even more business, that also builds our ‘authority’ with the search engines and keeps our rankings at the top.”
In just three months our PPC team were able to positively impact the PPC campaign performance:
- Cost per acquisition (CPA) reduced by 56%
- Increased conversions by 63%
‘Our business is built on the strength of our visibility on the search engines, from both our SEO and PPC. The results we have seen working with Vertical Leap has meant a 700% traffic increase from SEO and 63% increase in PPC conversions, all of which means, we are 100% certain Vertical Leap was the best choice for us.’
Rupert concludes.
*Statistics extracted from Google AdWords analysis correct at time of publishing.
Read more about ecommerce search marketing in our guide…