As mentioned in a previous post, my father, Tom Kuthy, recently started a Colorado Springs internet marketing consulting firm. One of his first clients is an e-commerce company called Online Dancewear. This company sells a wide range of dancewear for girls of all ages.
Online Dancewear had made limited efforts at SEO in the past with some success, and decided that it was time to take SEO more seriously. In April, they brought Tom in to do a complete re-work of the site, along SEO lines.
The first step, of course, was to conduct thorough keywword research. Through a process known in SEO circles as “semantic mapping”, Tom was able to cluster keywords with similar meaning into major and minor groups, by analyzing the searchers intent. From the semantic map, the keyword clusters were first mapped to 8 major product categories as follows:
The interesting thing about these categories is that the only convention they follow is driven by the search volume of the keywords. Generic groupings like “Dance Clothes” are mixed with brands and special offer categories - a mix that might not seem logical, but follows the best practices of SEO. The only category that does not correspond to the semantic map is the “Closeout” category, which the client added.
The next step in the SEO process was to map keywords to product sub-categories and then logically assign them to the categories above. Again, the semantic map was used as a guide for mapping the subcategories to the categories. In all, the company has optimized its site for 73 keywords as follows:
The new site went live on August 26th, and the engines are rapidly indexing all of the new content. As with any SEO project, the results will take some time to appear, but with a solid semantic map, and well thought out keyword mapping, I believe the results will be outstanding.
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