While it had a successful brick-and-mortar store, R.A.G. New York couldn't get its website's sales off the ground until the company turned to search engine optimization (SEO).
Jay Greenstein, president of R.A.G. New York says that while he has six physical locations for his stores, his website was generating only three sales per day. But after implementing an SEO campaign, Greenstein told the New York Daily News that sales went from $2,000 in August to more than $12,000 last December.
SEO works for small businesses by making sure the company's website appears on the first page of Google or any other search engine's result page. As Gabriel Shaoolian, creative director for Blue Fountain Media told the news provider, "page two is useless."
Greenstein told the paper that he paid $30,000 to get the project going and now spends $1,000 each month to make sure his website stays high in search results for specific keywords.
It appears that many retailers are turning to SEO to help generate website traffic and increasingly turning their back on paid search. A recent study from Internet Retailer found that 55.3 percent of respondents said they would increase their SEO budget in 2009 while only 24.2 percent said they would boost their use of paid search.
