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Case Study : Argos Business Solutions SEO and PfP Campaigns
Archived article dated Thursday November 17th 2005
The Argos Retail Group is the general merchandise business of GUS Plc, a retail and business services group. It was formed in 2000 to build on the experience of GUS Plc in home shopping and on the strengths of the Argos brand, which consumers associate with good value and convenience. The result is a multi-channel business that maintains separate retail brands with discrete propositions
Introduction
As a group member, Argos Business Solutions benefits from the scale of its combined buying and merchandising strategy. The retail brands provide the convenience of home shopping through different routes to market and are focused on broadening customer choice through the development of new products and services.
Argos Retail Group include Argos Limited, Homebase and Argos Retail Group Financial Services.
Argos Business Solutions specialises in reward and purchasing solutions for customers across the entire business spectrum. It offers all aspects of reward solutions and incentives - from traditional gift vouchers through to national consumer loyalty programmes. It also provides a range of products for businesses through its traditional catalogue service.
The Business Challenge
Argos Business Solutions needed a Search Marketing company that understood its traditional catalogue business as well as the complexities of its business-to-business division.
Prior to appointing ivantage Argos had carried out some search marketing activity in-house. This was predominantly PfP (Pay for Position, paid search on Google Adwords and Yahoo's Overture). Although it recognised the importance of organic SEO, its marketing department did not have the expertise to implement it and results for SEO and PfP were poor. Argos Business Solutions also realised that its existing web site needed changes to its design to work hand-in-hand with SEO and improve the success of the campaign.
Argos Business Solutions needed to attract quality visits using keywords and phrases that accurately reflected its business. The structure of its website was also a key concern and a limiting factor in the success of the SEO activity in the past.
The Business Objectives
Argos Business Solutions needed to improve conversion rates from visits to leads, across its Rewards and Procurement businesses. It needed to understand who was visiting the site, who was buying, who was leaving without placing an order and how this could be changed. It needed to track its campaigns more effectively.
The Target Market
Argos Business Solutions' target is pretty general. It defines its market as “The entire business community, from SMEs to large public sector organisations.” It needed to get to the decision makers, which vary tremendously, from businesses running incentives and reward programmes to those needing Argos products for their business.
Appointing a SEO Specialist
ivantage had a very good understanding of the business, and during initial discussions it was able to demonstrate how SEO could be used to improve visits and ultimately new business leads, and how the PfP campaign could be optimised to obtain more value and higher qualified leads.
Planning the Campaigns and Agreeing the Solution
ivantage carried out a full site review, while measuring the effectiveness of Argos Business Solutions' existing PfP campaign. The results revealed problems with both SEO and PfP and enabled the team to set out clear objectives, looking at what they needed to focus on in the short to medium term.
ivantage recommended that Argos continue with a PFP campaign, while improving its organic search engine positions. ivantage also recommended implementing web analytics across its site to improve information management.
Steve Cooper, Marketing Manager of Argos Business said “ivantage advised us throughout the whole process - in terms of best names and search terms relevant to our business. We all reviewed these to find the most relevant terms, phrases and pages for these to be linked to”. He added, “One aspect of our business that differs from Argos Retail is that we need an agency to work for us proactively. We do not have the resources in-house to manage web and SEO activity.”
The Results
The campaign is a success, and achieving targets set by the project manager. ivantage manages Urchin from Google Web Analytics for Argos Business Solutions enabling all aspects of the SEO and PfP campaigns to be measured.
Visits to the Argos Business Solutions Web site have increased from 3,500 per month to 5000 per month through organic and PFP search. A 43% increase in traffic to the site. Web site leads have improved by 10%
“ivantage is a very professional company that understands the SEO business in-depth. The company has had to understand the intricacies of our business and our constraints - but have worked with us to achieve great in-roads into the performance of our website.”
Steve Cooper, Marketing Manager, Argos Business Solutions
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