Overview

Client: Worthington Direct
Industry: Online Retail
Services: eCommerce SEO and eCommerce PPC

BACKGROUND

Worthington Direct initially engaged Vizion Interactive for SEO services in 2006. Two years later, Worthington Direct increased our engagement to include Google Ads efforts management, inclusive of large shopping campaigns. These engagements remain in effect today.

Many of Worthington Direct’s customers are educational as well as government agencies where purchasing cycles can be quite long and orders may come in via US Mail, email and, believe or not, by fax machine. Unlike a pure e-commerce business, where it is easier to attribute revenues back to online channels and then invest more or less in a channel, our challenge has always required more finesse truly understand the impact of each channel not just on observable online revenue, but also on the overall company topline revenue.

OBJECTIVE

The primary objective for both channels remain growth driven by online traffic, transactions and revenue, with a major focus on Revenue. The data below includes seeing them through two different site redesigns, a re-platforming, business shifts, algorithm overhauls, and various tactical changes.

As expected, our primary goal has always been to provide strategies that equate to overall growth from the search channels. The added layer for us includes a strategy focused on creating optimal balance between Organic and Paid Search to maximize the overall business potential of these channels.

This is where Vizion’s integrated approach has paid off for Worthington Direct because our team of experienced SEO and Paid Search professionals works closely with the data and the client’s own business expertise to find the right mix to fuel impressive growth year after year.

This strong client-agency partnership demonstrates how a long-term relationship rooted in trust, hard-work and deep collaboration lead to increasing success and rewards for both.

RESULTS

Organic Search

The longevity of this relationship means we have seen the seasonal ebbs and flows of their business, acquired a deep understanding of external market forces, and their internal organization’s business culture and technical strengths.

This has enabled us to collaboratively home in on the best quality keywords for their B2B business, not just based on a keyword volume focus. When comparing 2007-2008 Google Organic traffic to 2021-2022, we see an amazing lift of 969% in New Users:

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When reviewing the keyword rankings/presence over the past 10 years (as far back as Semrush will allow), we see a remarkable improvement, going from 2,411 to 5,041 keywords in the Top 10 Google rankings, a 109% increase.

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We continue to make strides and grow Worthington Direct’s presence in organic search, even after 15 years of our engagement together. In fact, year-over-year (2020-2021 compared to 2021-2022), we are realizing a 21 percent gain in New Users from Google Organic Search.

But organic search is just one component of our relationship with Worthington Direct…

Paid Search:

In 2008 we began managing WorthingtonDirect.com’s Paid Search efforts. With 2+ years’ experience working on their SEO, we had a good idea of what types of keywords to focus on to strike a good balance between Organic and Paid efforts.

Although there was reluctance in the beginning to increase paid advertising spend too quickly and risk cannibalizing our strong organic traffic, we built scalable search, shopping and display campaigns that complemented the organic traffic and which we could increase as we proved the Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

Proving the ROAS was not easy given revenue attribution difficulty due to long lag times and hybrid offline/online order management infrastructure.

Thus, we built a reporting and data modelling system that incorporates revenue data from all online and offline sources so we could measure the true impact of spending changes. Keeping a close eye on top-line revenues in addition to online-only measurements has enabled us to increase both ad spend and revenue more confidently and profitably each year through the date of this case study (2021).

As we enter into a new era, where increased privacy makes attribution even more difficult and AI-based automations obscure more online signals, the value of our relationship building has become even more valuable as a competitive asset as our SEO, paid search and client teams all work together to assess market changes independently of what is measurable online.