LawnMoa Garden Art SEO Case Study
LawnMoa started in 2014 with the filing of 150 questionnaires into high school teacher’s pigeon holes. We wanted to know what teachers valued about their gardens, and the value they place on garden sculptures. Teachers got talking, and we pitched our product in a staff meeting. Orders started coming directly to us, and also through our website order form. The pool of teachers in a school is very limited, we needed to find a sustainable marketing channel.
Michael Brandon is my father, who has fourteen years experience helping businesses get found online with a technique called search engine optimisation. Gleaning from his experiences, I researched what keywords people use to find garden art online. Traditionally garden art is purchased from garden centres, but the keyword research showed that many people were searching for “garden art”, “garden sculptures” and “garden ornaments”. If we could get the LawnMoa website to appear on the first page of Google search results for the keywords, LawnMoa would have a sustainable channel to reach customers.
I rewrote the content of the LawnMoa website to seem relevant to the keywords. There were a few techniques we employed to get our website higher in the order of results…
Spread the Word Online, and link back to our Website
We wrote articles and business listings on different websites such as Zoomin, Infonews, About.me and brandyourself.com in attempt to make our website more relevant to what people are looking for. When other websites link to you with relevant text, your website seems like it is more relevant for the search phrases you targeted. I suppose the effort in manually linking to our website was limited. Only a few listings were created because we concentrated on direct marketing with people we knew. Although, the linking seemed to be working as our rankings skyrocketed from nowhere to the second and third page of Google in a short amount of time.
Spread the Word by Sharing a Great Story
The greatest success was not in all of the stories we wrote and shared on the internet, nor was our greatest success in social media. We simply told people our story in person. LawnMoa exists to support the conservation of New Zealand’s wildlife, so we endeavoured to pull a few heart strings. Before long our story caught on, and the Manawatu standard published an article in the weekly newspaper. Stuff.co.nz republished the article and soon a handful of news sites were linking to our website. The LawnMoa website moved up a few places in Google rankings.
Newspapers Round Two
Spurred on by local newspaper coverage, we continued to share our story to people we knew, and through local school newsletters. We approached The Tribune, another local paper who then published an article about LawnMoa. Again the article was shared online but we found that too many websites shared the article. The extra coverage was appreciated, but every one of the articles were republished were identical. Google’s algorithms saw that so many of the articles had the same content, and so devalued with benefit any links from those articles might have for our website.
The key thing I was learnt is that to make SEO successful, both an online and offline marketing effort is needed. While we did not have success with mucking around and testing out different ways to improve the rank of the website, I personally began to take further interest. That Summer I worked closely with my dad to learn more about search engine optimisation (SEO. He was looking to move from working as SearchMasters (his SEO consultant company) to work within a team of another company. To my suprise and delight Michael offered for me to take over SearchMasters. Since then I have cut my teeth to learn the ins and outs of helping businesses with search engine optimisation to get found online. My dad has been mentoring me over the journey to not only master the skill, but to build a sustainable business.