SEO Case Study - Thomas Publishing

World’s leading publisher of industrial directories sees 4,000 visitors per day increase to over 30,000 per day.

Company Background: 100-year legacy

Thomas Publishing is been known as THE Publisher of Industrial Directories for over 100 years.  With over 60,000 clients and a lock on the print directories, Thomas seemed to be untouchable until the Internet came along. 

Problem: Search My Content!

Like most publishers, Thomas Publishing had mounds of great content to serve up to the major search engines like Google.  The problem was none of that content was being found due to a legacy database system that was serving dynamic pages, which are not friendly to the search engine crawlers.  Thomas wanted its rightful spot at the top of Google results pages when engineers were searching for industrial products.

Solution: Walk Before You Run

BOL tackled the problem in 3 phases:

1. To start, a complete Diagnostic Audit was done on the existing Thomas sites, by looking at the site wide factors (architecture, file path structure, database, etc.), on-page factors (content, link exchange, title tags) and off-page factors (link nomenclature, content matching) and built a complete analysis of where ThomasRegister.com needed to focus their efforts. 
2. Next, BOL built a plan of attack.  The plan included a prioritized list of action items of  “must do’s, should do’s and nice to do’s.”  In that list, the tasks were delegated amongst the IT resources in Thomas, the SEO experts at BOL and outside support needed from other partners.
3. Finally, it was time to implement.  Starting with the top of the priority list and working our way down, the SEO implementation took less than two weeks and results were seen days after the final submission.

Results

Within four days of Google crawling the revised site, Thomas’ EZ directory sites saw an increase in traffic of around 4,000 visitors a day to over 30,000 per day.  Now Thomas finds themselves with over 70,000 page views a day and is reaping tremendous benefit from such exposure.  Some highlights of results to Thomas’ bottom line were:

• Top rankings for thousands of keyword phrases driving serious brand awareness.
• Exponential traffic growth in percentiles that did not even seem reasonable.
• Senior executive management said that they felt over $10 million in sales revenue was attributable to the search engine efforts.

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