The Challenge
The request was to optimize the theory.com site to maximize its presence on the search engines for “Theory” branded terms. At the time of the request there were numerous branded, high-volume keyword terms where theory did not have a presence. This was allowing either the competition or distributors to be the first point of contact for the brand and they wanted that to change.
Theory was very specific about what we would and would not be able to do on their site. By placing strict limitations on what elements of the site we were allowed to alter, many of the normal SEO techniques had to be abandoned in favor of alternative methods for achieving the end result.
The Solution
The first step of the project was to break down their branded keyword set. Starting with roughly 250 keywords we first distilled the list down to 130 by eliminating those keywords that historically had not driven enough traffic to justify the optimization effort. After determining that 80 of those keywords were already positioned within the top three results on Google, we identified an initial set of 50 keywords which created our first major challenge.
We had 80 well positioned keyword rankings using most of the valuable real estate on theory.com (a small site) that we would normally use for our own optimization efforts. This situation forced us to break down every single URL on the entire site making sure that as we re-optimized, not only did we work in our new keywords to the appropriate landing pages but that we also maintained the existing keywords.
The Results
Through the use of updated site tags, limited internal site cross linking, and minor content adjustments we were able to engineer enough relevant URLs to optimize for all 50 additional keywords.
Two weeks after all of the implementation changes were made, 25 of the 50 keywords were rankings in the top three positions of Google and 40 of the 50 were first page. One month after the changes were made 49 of the 50 keywords were first page on Google.