Furniture Store Internet Marketing and Website Design Case Study

Recently we were approached by a furniture store that has been in business for over thirty years.  For the last ten years they have owned a published website.  It was a basic website with little detail that unfortunately did not receive any traffic and did not help generate any sales for their business.  Their site also had no traffic reporting so there was no way to know if anybody was visiting their website.

We recommended that they allow us to build a new site for them designed to increase the amount of traffic received compared to their previous site.  Installing a new site with traffic reporting also enables them to know exactly how many people are visiting their site.  This store deals particularly in high-end furniture.  Naturally, we wanted to be sure to help this store separate themselves from other furniture stores selling lower-quality furniture.  We decided that since consumers often search for specific manufactured goods the most effective strategy would be to emphasize the particular manufacturers, materials, and styles the store carries so that consumers searching for these specific items will find the site when searching online.  So if, for example, a person searches for a McKenzie Queen bed, their store’s website will be returned as a search result.  An interesting statistic we are aware of is that approximately eighty-percent of consumers interested in buying a specific item will search online for the best price, and seventy-percent of those consumers will then travel to a store to buy the item because they want to see what they are purchasing in person.  So listing specific items and prices in high detail in this instance is critical to maximizing potential sales.

After building the store a new site and optimizing it for Google (the most used search engine) results and other search engines they told us they were ready to go live on a Friday afternoon.  As soon as we make a site available, Google searches it and – put simply - determines search engine placement.  Of course businesses don’t always experience such instant results, but we were excited to learn that the next morning a customer called the store and bought an item after finding it in their online showroom!  Most customers search for something extremely specific.  In this case, it was a McKenzie Queen bed.  A Google search for McKenzie Queen bed returned this client’s site as the number one result on Google, even higher than the website of the actual manufacturer of the McKenzie Queen bed!  It was very rewarding to receive tangible results, and to experience them so quickly serves as a fine example of how well our system works.  Over President’s Day weekend the store had a sale and experienced three major sales from customers who found the site by searching for very specific pieces of furniture.  These items would have remained unsold if they had not been found through an online search.  The store is experiencing increased sales as their site receives more traffic and the client is very satisfied.  The site has breathed new life into this business.  Helping to turn around a struggling business is very rewarding for us.  We are proud that we were able to deliver immediate and measurable results for this customer.

This client was able to sell a product within twenty-four hours of their site going live.  This was a product that the client previously thought nobody was interested in.  The customer was simply unable to find the product or a store that carried it and the store was unable to find a buyer for it.  Obviously the business had missed out on countless sales as a result of the poorly designed website’s inability to allow its products to found by search engines.  With careful attention to detail, and a modest investment, imagine what a properly built search engine optimized website can accomplish for your business or practice.

Written by: James Nisky