SEO Project – Gilded Social

We were contacted by Tanya of Gilded Social in July 0f 2018. She had newly acquired the Bridesmaid line of dresses from another local business and had recently opened shop in downtown Columbus. She was previously contracted with one of the most prominent agencies in Columbus who “wouldn’t give her the time of day” and at one point her Google My Business was suspended and the company said “it wasn’t their fault” even though they were the ones managing it at the time and she was out of the country when it happened.

A frustrating experience to say the least for her, she came to us looking for SEO guidance and how to better improve her website. After a few scans, we noticed a few things:

1. The directories that were supposed to be correct had incorrect data
2. Meta titles and descriptions, a basic SEO task, were not filled out.
3. The website lacked keyword usage on all pages, including not using “Columbus” keywords where her shop was trying to rank
4. The website was very weak and have almost no links going to it – her competition had almost 200 more than she did
5. She had some ok metrics with about 400 total keywords but rankings we low

We went through and manually fixed many of these deficiencies, optimizing pages better, adding keywords and content where appropriate, fixing all of the citations to ensure Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) were correct, and more. We had some pretty quick success with her website, moving up dozens of bridesmaids keywords and improving from ~370 to almost 540 organic visits in about ~2 months worth of work.

We also did extensive research into her field and products to see what types of keywords were customers searching for.

Tanya was very hands-on with her website so eventually, we built out a framework and gave high-level guidance of how we would proceed going forward – which was to hone in on various designers, types of dresses they were selling, and structure the website more like an eCommerce website, even though she primarily only sold in-person bridesmaid dresses at that point.

Tanya took the lead on much of the design side while we helped with structure guidance and how to properly built the website with SEO in mind. We also took care of the technical items like meta data, 301 redirects, and other SEO elements while she mainly worked on the front end.

After a few months of working together, we moved to a quarterly schedule for the better part of 2 years as she’d work building many pages and we’d go in and optimize them, clean up some of the technical issues, and so on. Her website ended up ranking extremely well right below many of the dress designer’s branded websites. Later on she actually began to sell bridal gowns, in addition to bridesmaids, so we restructured the website to include bridal lines as well.

With thousands of changes over the course of a few years, the website now ranks for over 3400 keywords and receives an estimated 2300 organic visits which is pretty accurate close to the “search” traffic from Squarespace analytics (~2700/mo if you do the math).