Piragis Northwoods Company quadruples conversions with search engine optimization

Boosting organic search results for your website is one of the most important things you can do as a retailer, but this requires a thorough understanding of search engine optimization (SEO) and the power search engines wield over the success of your online business. SEO is a moving target, with leading engines like Google adjusting their algorithms frequently and online spaces becoming more crowded and competitive. For premier camping, canoeing and kayaking outfitter Piragis Northwoods Company, this challenge proved difficult to overcome on its own.

Managing SEO as a retailer adds another degree of difficulty as thousands of unique pages for individual SKUs compete with similar products online. Piragis made headway on the goal of improving its website’s performance and beginning SEO practices by digitizing the company catalog and enabling e-commerce for each item. But the team quickly ran into the issue of maintaining a great user experience while meeting the basic requirements of web crawlers and robots that determine SEO success.

“I had been working on optimizing SEO on my own, but it’s a huge job and partnering with an expert was definitely going to be necessary to do it right. … Since I was already using Command Retail for POS and E-Commerce, it was very easy for Celerant to see exactly what I was doing and they hit the ground running.”
– Tim Stouffer, Director, Piragis Northwoods Company

Website Auditing & Code Cleanup

To go about SEO the right way for Piragis, Celerant began by completing a detailed website audit, enabling tracking analytics to study the site’s data. This revealed duplicate content, which raises red flags with search engine algorithms and often causes pages to rank lower in importance—an issue that needed to be fixed quickly. Celerant cleaned up this code on the backend and worked with the company to execute frontend cleanup. The effort included reworking the site map and page hierarchy and rewriting page titles and metadata to optimize keyword use.

Moving Beyond the Keywords

Celerant’s cleanup work also encouraged the Piragis IT team to implement SEO best practices on the website’s content itself by adjusting page copy, activating user reviews on each page and standardizing image sizes to be more in line with social media platform requirements. Supplementing website fixes with social media posts on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat enhanced the brand’s visibility more directly for consumers, and in doing so, new backlinks brought added benefits to this great SEO effort.

“Not only do these results boost our bottom line, they also feed back into our SEO efforts. Search engines can see buyer behavior, and when they track a click through that converts, that gives the product page a higher ranking. So the SEO that boosted conversions works to boost SEO further.”
– Tim Stouffer, Director, Piragis Northwoods Company

Throwing video into the mix also proved highly beneficial for a retailer that brings extensive product expertise to the field. Because Piragis tests each item it stocks, and has a long history of doing so to ensure customer satisfaction, the team created comprehensive videos to tell the story of each product on its own page and reinforce the brand among consumers, linking SEO efforts to YouTube and giving key product pages a boost.

More Traffic, More Quality

The added level of authenticity and value that these tactics brought helped Piragis see tremendous results after just nine months. The company saw doubled daily traffic and higher quality visitors that quadrupled conversion rates in under a year. Because of Celerant’s retail solutions and SEO expertise, the outfitter was able to take the digital world by storm and reach its audience effectively to share a love of the great outdoors with more likeminded consumers.

Want more details about Piragis’s experience with Celerant and Stratus Retail? Download the full case study below to learn more today and get a free demo of the industry’s #1 ranked retail software if you’re ready to see how it can work for your company.