DogWatch - Hidden Dog Fence Manufacturer

DogWatch is a company that cares about the safety of your pets. Since 1990 they’ve manufactured hidden dog fences and pet containment systems that are second to none. DogWatch was referred to High Rankings in 2007 by their website developers as they started asking them about how to increase the leads their dealers received through their website. The developers had created a search engine friendly website for DogWatch from the get-go, but they didn’t offer in-depth SEO services that only a dedicated search marketing firm can supply.

DogWatch’s Challenge

Dogwatch faced the challenge of having great products, but not enough traffic to supply their dealers with many leads. However their pet containment systems touted advanced features that they felt were superior to the competition, so they desperately wanted to get the word out to people searching the Internet. We knew their products were good as they had received praise from veterinary professionals and Consumer Buying Guides alike. But their Internet presence could certainly be better.

Additional challenges were that many of the main keyword phrases for their industry were trademarked terms of their long-established competitors. There were strict legal rules with what words could be used on their website pages, and ones that couldn’t.

Our Challenge

In order to comply with the legal restriction of trademarked phrase usage, we had to get creative with how we said certain phrases on the website. We wanted to use the keyword phrases that people were searching for at the engines to find the hidden fence products DogWatch offered, but we couldn’t easily work them into the pages of the site without expecting a call from the competitor’s legal team.

Kick-off Meeting

Our campaign got under way with an in-person kickoff meeting where we interviewed the DogWatch team and discussed the objectives of the campaign and how we would meet those objectives. The phases of the campaign were reviewed and the processes of our work were outlined so that everyone on the team was on the same page.

Full SEO Services We Provided:

We performed an initial site audit so that we could understand the issues the site was facing.
We extensively researched keyword phrases.
We made site architecture recommendations to ensure that the most important pages of the site would receive the internal link popularity they deserved.
We reviewed the site’s pages and decided which ones were the best candidates for SEO.
We worked with DogWatch to choose which keyword phrases belonged on which pages of the site.
We rewrote each page of the website in a manner that explained exactly what DogWatch offered in easy-to-understand, descriptive language that spoke to their target audience. • We optimized each page's Title and Meta description tags for their targeted keyword phrases.
We set up their Google Analytics and began monthly reporting/recommendations.

Measuring Success

As was expected, the first month and a half did not show any major progress in traffic. However, we started to see progress around 2 -3 months into the campaign. Traffic for those months’ was the highest they had ever been for the site. And more importantly, the increased traffic was converting at the same or higher rates than previous lower levels of traffic.

Here are some highlights of our preliminary data. Please keep in mind that it’s only been 6 months since our work has gone live:

In terms of overall visitor traffic the most visits in a month the site ever had was about 14,000 with about 9,000 unique visitors. In January, just the 2nd month of our campaign, that number had already been surpassed, as January saw about 15,000 visits and over 10,000 unique visitors. The campaign continued to gain steam as the benchmark numbers set in each previous month were surpassed in the following month. In April, the record that had been set in March was shattered once again as the site received 21,885 visits and 16,043 absolute unique visitors during this time frame.

As you can see, traffic is continuing on an upward trend and even the low points of traffic are increasing when compared to previous months as represented by the straight line.

The number of visits from organic search previously established for the site was between 4,800 to 5,400 visits. January had 6,546 visits which was, at that point, the highest amount of visits sent by organic search to the site ever, a record that was then surpassed again in February, March and now April, which had 10,381 visits from organic search. That’s around a 50% increase since the start of the campaign!

The monthly average of visits from Google organic search traffic that was established ranged from 3,600 to 4,200+ visits. January had 4,936 visits which was above the average and the highest we had seen for a month thus far. As with organic search in general, this record was then surpassed again in February, March and April, which had 7,837 visits from organic search. Again, around a 50% increase since the start of the campaign!

In terms of conversions, the site has seen fairly consistent percentages over the course of the campaign despite the large increase in traffic. Slight increases have been witnessed from month to month as well.

There has been a steady increase in people finding the DogWatch website through the keyword phrases for which we optimized, as well as for additional variations of those core phrases.

According to conversations we’ve had with DogWatch, their dealers have been extremely pleased with the additional traffic and phone calls they are experiencing. Over the coming months we will be working on additional ways to drive traffic and phone calls to the dealer companies, as that was the ultimate goal of the SEO campaign.

The initial 6-month phase of this case study has just been completed, and it is safe to say that the campaign has been a resounding success thus far. We expect to see even higher search engine traffic numbers in the months to come as the campaign continues based on past experience.