1. Eaton Street Seafood

E-Commerce SEO & Content Marketing for Lead Generation

As Key West’s premier downtown retail seafood market, Eaton Street Seafood Market offered incredible potential for SEO development. The business was well-known to tourists and snowbirds from all over the USA. The business had a healthy supply of loyal customers coming into the shop year after year.

However, the business was totally dead in the off season. They wanted year-’round income so were interested in pursuing online sales of fresh fish.

The Challenge

The problems were:

1. Awareness. Customers were not aware that the company shipped. Once they left town, there was no way to stay in contact. The owner did collect emails in the store but with sporadic results and no direction. As a result, his email list was tiny and pretty much useless.
2. Lack of an Online Presence. Their customer base existed entirely in the physical realm. Loyal fans were not directed to website, social media, or the email list so there was no connection between the brick-and-mortar shop and the website
3. Inadequate Website Functionality. The website itself was not set up to properly handle e-commerce. The owner came to me with a generic WordPress template website that had a rudimentary & insufficient shopping cart (Cart66) installed for selling products
4. Optimization. The site was not optimized for traffic, conversions, or sales.
5. Content Management. There was very little original content on the website.

2021 Update

Eaton Street is still having me do their online marketing. Covid actually increased online sales and the owners deceided to invest more in their online presence.  I expanded all the content on their site and also used Surfer SEO’s content editor to beef up the secondary keywords. I also did local SEO and the site is consistantly at the top of the results for map searches.

Here is chart showing the sites continued hrowth in the number of page 1 rankings.

Local SEO

Since the market launched it’s restaurant side expanding into local SEO made perfect sense and has shown fantastic results.

This chart shows analysis from their Google My Business page. Over 1k in calls this past quarter!

2. Seize the Day Charters

Lead Generation & Mobile Readiness

It’s general “knowledge” in Key West that the best way for a charter fisherman to get bookings is to work with a concierge. Much like in the hotel industry, small, independent businesses find it virtually impossible to compete with the giant corporate booking websites. The competition for customers is no less than fierce and the booking aggregators have huge budgets for locking down PPC as well as organic search.

Nevertheless, Captain Pepe wanted to give it a try and I was the guy to do the job. Key West is an extremely popular tourist destination that commands higher prices for everything, from sandwiches to hotels. A full day of charter fishing costs $1200. When Captain Pepe’s charters are booked through a booking site, he loses 20% of that or $240 per charter. That was motivation for him to contact me and see if I could begin developing leads for him.

With some SEO expertise and a content marketing strategy to go with it, fishinkeywest.com was able to make headway against the titans that it was up against.  

The Challenge

Here are the challenges Captain Pepe and I were facing when he hired me:

1. Competition. On a tiny four-by-two-mile island, there are over 100 independent charter fishermen (and women). In addition, many of them have aged, established websites that rank well in the SERPs and are hard to knock down. There are also some very fat cats in the business with big budgets who throw every penny toward PPC, making that avenue a tough route to take for smaller or newer fishing guides who wish to enter the game with paid search.  
2. No Mobile Search Traffic. Captain Pepe’s website had none of the markings of a local business and therefore mobile search was yielding him little to no traffic whatsoever. 
3. Not Mobile Friendly. Captain Pepe’s site was not responsive and therefore not easily accessible on devices other than a laptop or PC. 
4. Dual SEO Strategy Required. Fishing charter customers tend to plan their trip while in their home state and then sometimes book from their phones once they are local. Therefore in order to effectively capture leads, Pepe needed the double whammy of both local and general SEO. Starting from pretty much scratch.
5. Aimless Content. Despite having published fishing reports, Pepe’s organic traffic had decreased over a period of several years until it flatlined.
6. Static Website. Pepe had an HTML website that was unwieldy to manage, let alone optimize.

The Results

The results have been fantastic. Not only does he usually appear in the map pack for many local search terms, but he is also on the front page for many of the most sought-after national terms.

This graph shows the improvement:

On the next 2 images, you can see that goal completions are up 366.67% over the same time period last year. There is a 190% increase in traffic. The owner of the website pretty much thinks I am the greatest thing ever. We have an ongoing SEO Consultation agreement now and I continue to improve his website and his online presence. Currently setting our sights on social media dominance. The challenge there is to get a fisherman to post pictures!

2021 Update

Pepe is still working with with me and actually last month was the best month of the entire campaign. Chart of traffic growth, below. It keeps going steadily up.

3. Ivy League Content

Clarify Branding & Establish Social Media Presence to Generate Leads

One might think that an independent freelance content writer could never compete with big, professional agencies out there like Constant Content or freelance marketplaces like UpWork or Freelancer, especially since most companies consider it to be risky to just go out and hire a freelancer.  However, with stellar branding and a social media campaign to go with it, Cat was able to hit the ground running and grow her business way beyond her expectations (Ivy League Content, LLC is the business name of Catherine Tims).

The Challenge

Here’s what we were dealing with as we began the project:

1. Competition. The online world of written content is extremely competitive and she had to make herself stand out from the throngs of low-quality writers.  
2. No Online Presence. Although Cat had worked as a writer for years but through referrals and local networking only.
3. No Branding. Cat was at square one with trying to figure out her brand.
4. No Market Positioning. Despite having published worked for years for a handful of clients, Cat had no idea what she should be charging once she “hung out her shingle”. There was a lot of work to be done on clarifying where she fit in the world of content writing. What was her unique selling proposition (USP)? 
5. No Website. Cat had no website and therefore SEO would be an uphill battle, starting from scratch.

The Results

The results have been fantastic. Cat is swamped with orders and has increased her prices five-fold since she started Ivy League Content. Engagement on social media is great and she has expanded her presence from one platform (Twitter) to three (adding Instagram and LinkedIn). She is not a fan of Facebook so there is minimal effort put into that area of social media marketing. Almost all her orders come from Twitter, LinkedIn, and a growing number of referrals.