A lasting stream of reliable SEO traffic — good tactics for marketing baby products.

Green parenting site built on natural search optimization reaches 18,000 visitors monthly — proving that search-friendly content is the mother of all things.

Results

In early 2009, hippie dippie bébé was ranked #1 on Google for “teething remedies”, a search term that, according to Google’s keyword tool receives nearly 4,000 searches monthly. The site receives traffic from over 5,000 unique natural parenting keywords monthly, with 30 of these driving between 50 and 2,500 visits per month.

As of May 2011 traffic figures include:

• Overall traffic of nearly 18,700 visitors monthly.
• 9,000 unique views monthly of the page “Natural Teething Home Remedies”, with daily visits ranging from 260 to 400.
• A full 84% of traffic — over 15,000 visitors monthly — from free organic search engine listings.
• Total organic traffic from Google: 13,900 visitors monthly as of May 2011.

Traffic continues to grow on our natural parenting blog, at a rate of 10-20% monthly. But what is perhaps most interesting to note is that this growth has not required active nurturing. Since May of 2009 we have added only one new article to the live site.

We consider our experiment in natural parenting SEO a success — and a good case study for small businesses marketing to parents, and interested in tapping into a steady stream of reliable traffic comprised of expectant parents looking for solutions. 78% of pageviews on the site are generated by just four well-optimized articles based on carefully-selected keywords.

By building a solid SEO foundation and nurturing it with well-researched content, it’s possible to generate consistent traffic and ongoing brand exposure.

Solution

Our results exemplify the power of good content and proper SEO architecture.

The project was designed as a relatively pure study of the ability of on-page and on-site SEO practices alone to achieve results, with very little labor intensive social media optimization or link building efforts. Clearly social media has an important place in any marketing arsenal, but not all green small businesses have the luxury or resources to incorporate every element extensively in their marketing mix. Our test case proves that search engine optimization still stacks up, with or without social media.

Google has a known practice of scoring web pages by the number of links they receive from other sites (known as “page rank”). Interestingly, despite this factor, our number one Google rank for “teething remedies” was earned at a time when the page itself had no external links.

Ranking Factors for On-Site SEO

Why did this page rank so well for a mid-tail term with 4,000 searches monthly? Primarily three factors:

1. The google snippet, leading visitors to the page, was controlled with a strong marketing message. The meta description tag, a simple SEO/Marketing tactic, leads with a question: “What’s the best place to turn to find home remedies? Moms!” It’s highly likely that this mini “advertisement” for the search listing drives heavy click through.
2. The page was written to drive user engagement. The popular “top ten” article format was made even more powerful by actually scoring “teething remedies” according to real mom’s voices on public forums, and furthermore by listing in a 10 to 1 reverse order, a time tested formula for keeping attention among readers and TV viewers alike. Thus heavy click-through is complemented by low bounce back to search results. Visitors find what they’re looking for and keep reading.
3. The WordPress installation was SEO-optimized. Permalinks utilize category subdirectories and optimized slugs to incorporate keywords, important pages for SEO receive site wide links, category and archive pages display excerpts-only with title links to avoid canonicalization, and title, heading, and robots tags are used effectively. The WordPress CMS platform, originally a tool only for bloggers, has become so renowned for its both user-friendly and search-friendly qualities that it is now used frequently to host business websites, business blogs, and even eCommerce sites.

In plain English: the more people click through to your page from Google’s search results, and the longer they stay on your page, the stronger your ability to rank for a term.

At the time of this study, usage statistics such as click-through and bounce were only beginning to be postulated as a possible ranking factor in Google’s organic search engine results. Today, these factors are now commonly cited by SEO experts — and were confirmed by this project as early as 2009.

Original, well-written content has become even more important since Google’s Panda algorithm update in March of 2011. Though many sites lost significant traffic in that update, our content strategy for hippie dippie bébé and other client sites has experienced the opposite effect. Our traffic and rankings rose after Google’s algorithm change.

Since the Panda update, there has been a buzz of activity about “content optimization”. But content SEO isn’t new — we’ve been doing it since before 2008 and we continue to benefit!

Marketing to Parents By Helping Parents

The posts on hippie dippie bébé were written as well-researched SEO-optimized topical content — not heavy marketing jargon — and are also essentially the type of informative articles that can drive customers to any website featuring baby products, natural products, or green and environmental services. Natural products marketing particularly lends itself to SEO, as the typical LOHAS customer uses their quest for complete information to guide positive habits in their life and their purchasing.

By utilizing SEO to answer the questions that expectant parents will naturally have about baby care, marketing baby products can be made just a bit easier. What are the questions that your customers need answered? Are you helping them find you by helping them find honest answers?