Patrick Wallen designs and installs custom wine cellars (ArtisticCellars.com) in the San Francisco area.  Working with a relative, they had developed an image-heavy, minimalist website.  It was buried on page 5 of Google search results.  Their Yellow Pages ads were expensive and ineffective.  We optimized their website and moved a portion of the Yellow pages budget into Google advertising. Now they have the top listing in the search results and Google AdWords advertising brings in 75% of their new business leads.

How did we do it?  The ingredients were there, we just needed to put them to work effectively to bring in new business.  Their public relations were excellent.  When ABC-TV chose a home in Penngrove, CA for an Extreme Makeover, they hired the best they could find and Patrick Wallen created a custom wine cellar in a week.  Their wine cellars were featured on MSNBC and in luxury design books, but none of this appeared on their old website.

AnetGain created a seven page “front-end” for the existing website and optimized it for search engines.  We put links to the extensive photo galleries at the top of the new home page so that search engines could discover the 80-plus pages that had been built by the relative.  We featured a link to the slideshow of the television makeover program.  We added a video link to a TV story on a local winery.  We added a link to the publisher of design book that featured a number of Patrick Wallen’s custom wine cellars.  We created pages that were text-heavy, pulling in images and descriptions of the many projects completed over 15 years.  Most important, we created a sitemap and registered it with Google.

Amateur web developers rarely understand how to make it easy for search engines to discover all the pages in a website.  A good way is to create a sitemap, an even better way is to create effective navigation so that all the pages of a website can be reached from each page.  For a very large site, create a hierarchy, as we did with Artistic Wine Cellars.   The tabs at the top of each new page link to the gallery pages, which had been buried deep in the old website. These gallery pages provide the links that search engines can follow to discover the extensive resources available at ArtisticCellars.com.   In just a few weeks, Artistic Wine Cellars jumped to the top of the search engine listings.

Patrick Wallen did not hesitate to start advertising on Google.  We started advertising “Custom Wine Cellars” right away so that when the new website was launched we already had a track record or clicks.  We set a monthly advertising budget using money shifted from Yellow Pages advertising.  We work together to manage the bids for the keywords and the text ads to make sure that the Google AdWords advertising brings in qualified leads for this $200,000+ home upgrade.

Patrick’s wife Madeline said, “Anet, I love you! We are at the top of the Google results!  Thank you so much!”