The Gammon Press Increases Sales with Website Coaching
A marketing and copywriting consultant to banks and other small businesses, Patrice Robertie, principal of Acorn Advertising, is also married to the foremost backgammon expert in the world, Bill Robertie.
I first met Patrice a few years ago at a New England Direct Marketing (NEDMA) event — and was delighted to learn that she was one of my favorite commentators on a blog we both read regularly.
Patrice knew her husband’s Website, The Gammon Press, needed some work, but she wasn’t sure which steps to take first. Because she is a marketer, Patrice understood the value of developing a Website that increased sales, but she didn’t understand the technical side of online marketing — i.e. search engine optimization (SEO), shopping carts and the like.
Patrice decided to take advantage of my Strategic Marketing Coaching Clinic. The heart of the Coaching Clinic is a comprehensive audit coupled with recommended changes based on the client’s goals. In Patrice and Bill’s case, they wanted to increase sales of Bill’s backgammon books and products.
Before doing the Website and SEO audit, I had no idea that Bill Robertie was *the* Bill Robertie, backgammon expert. (He’s also a top-ranked poker player — you might see him on TV.)
Learning about Bill and studying the Gammon Press Website, I noticed that while Bill had dozens of articles that mentioned him or were written by him, many of these articles didn’t link back to his Gammon Press site. Bill even had a Wikipedia page written about him — again with no link to his site!
In addition, when you typed his name into Google, The Gammon Press site didn’t show up (for various reasons). Clearly Bill needed to take advantage of his name and his expertise.
At the end of the audit, I had 18 changes Patrice could implement to make the site rank better in the search engines as well as improve the visitor experience once someone landed on the site.
The Gammon Press Home Page — Before
The Clinic includes a one hour call to go over all findings; after the call, Patrice took her list of “to dos” and set to work. According to Patrice, it took her three months to implement the recommended changes. The process took this long because she was also learning about SEO, how to write title tags, and analyzing the data from Google Analytics.
Changes to the Gammon Press site included:
* Redirecting links to the Gammon Press site
* Signing up for Google Analytics, adding it to the site, and learning how to read the data
* Performing low-level SEO, researching keywords, and writing meta tags
* Adding text to the home page
* Removing dead products, updating all content
* Adding a coaching page
* Adding a shopping cart
* Playing up Bill’s name as the recognized pro backgammon and poker player that he is
Patrice also updated Bill’s Wikipedia page, wrote a bio for him for his Amazon author page, and signed up for Google Alerts in order to track when Bill is mentioned in the media.
None of these to-dos involved wholesale design changes, although Patrice did work with Sonora DesignWorks to implement the mostly text changes and to add new pages and the shopping cart. (Patrice now uses Contribute, a content management system that allows her to make simple text changes to the site.)
The result of all this work? Traffic that converts. Bill is now getting three to five sales a week from the site. In addition, he’s now getting calls from people who want backgammon coaching. According to Patrice, he’s done nothing to promote this service except to add a new coaching page to the site.
Even more important, when you type Bill’s name into Google, The Gammon Press site is now on the first page of Google — and while his Wikipedia page usually ranks higher, this page now has a link back to the Gammon Press site, making it easy to get targeted traffic to the site.
The Gammon Press Home Page — After
Sums up Patrice, “Bill and I knew that the site needed work, but we didn’t want to redesign it. However, I also wasn’t sure what to do it with it, which is why we didn’t take action sooner. I had been following Dianna for months and knew that while she is very technically-savvy, she also sees the big picture. Her advice to play up Bill — because he is a recognized pro — was spot on. It was just the objective advice we both needed. My husband is delighted with the changes to his site, and now I can take what I learned and apply it to my site and my clients’ sites. It was a win-win for everyone.”
Thank you, Patrice, and thank you Bill. You both are awesome, and it was a real honor to work with you. I’m so happy to see your success!
