Overview:
Headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Borders Group, Inc., is a publicly held company with 2009 consolidated sales of $2.8 billion. Throughout more than 650 stores, Borders helps people create richer and more satisfying lives through knowledge and entertainment. Borders’ customers enjoy the books, music, movies, and other entertainment items they love in a relaxing, enjoyable atmosphere.
Objective:
Increase website traffic and sales by raising Borders.com’s organic search rankings for targeted keywords.
Challenge:
Borders’ website was built on a custom CMS that made SEO recommendations difficult to implement. Poor site optimization was severely limiting rankings for non-branded keywords, and problems with 301 redirects, internal linking, XML sitemaps and product page content created indexation roadblocks that confused the search engines. Moreover, many deeper site pages did not have any inbound links, resulting in lowered rankings for title specific pages and category pages.
Strategy:
Anvil completed a full website SEO audit to outline all issues hindering rankings, where it became clear that a new website was the best course of action. Anvil then worked closely with Borders’ leadership and IT team to scope and prioritize recommended SEO action items, which were then built into the launch of a new, clean website. Simultaneously, Anvil helped Borders launch an XML sitemap index to ensure that more of Borders’ pages would be indexed, and Anvil also outlined and executed a link building strategy for key internal pages to help boost their rankings.
Results:
Over 400% increase in pages indexed, a 17% increase in non-branded organic search traffic each week and 1st position rankings for multiple targeted keywords including “kids books.”