MARKETING SUCCESS STORY: ACTIVEANGLER.COM
ActiveAngler.com is truly an amazing success story. . . .
Red Rocket Media Group had the opportunity to build ActiveAngler.com from the ground up, so we scoured the world for talented professional fishermen who would be willing to share their advice. With the help of 75 of the world’s most well respected fishermen, this site has now grown to more than 1,000 pages and has commanded over 50 million hits since it was launched in 2001.
The site has fish recipes, a section to actually ask one of the site’s experts a question and offers how-to articles that give step-by-step instructions on how to do everything from tying knots to purchasing a fly rod.
The ultimate goal of the site was to attract large amounts of traffic and keep the users at the site for an extended amount of time. By positioning ActiveAngler as one of the best fishing sites on the Web, not only do we attract millions of hits every year, but we also keep visitors at the site on average 3x as long as the leading competitors’ sites.
How did we accomplish this? First, we built a site optimized for search engines which attracts visitors to the site without the use of any expensive marketing. Secondly, we were able to get people to stay at the site by providing fast-loading pages, filled with great content that’s easy to find through clean drop-down menus.
Below you’ll find a bar chart showing the growth of ActiveAngler’s traffic between March 2004 and June 2007. Notice that the growth continues to build even through the winter months when the fishing industry is typically slow.
How do we continue this sort of growth? The answer is search engines.
Many Web development firms continue to ignore the importance of search engines. We feel that since 86% of all Internet users find sites they are looking for through a search engine, it should be one of our primary focuses.
When a search comes back, providing thousands of results ranked by relevance, the sites not listed toward the top of the search results (in the top 20 or so) are the sites that are rarely visited. That’s why we focus on creating sites that are consistently ranked high in the major search engines by employing a variety of relatively unknown techniques to assure that our sites are found. If they’re found, that means traffic to the sites and, ideally, increased sales.
If you want a Web-development firm which understands successful Internet marketing, Red Rocket is your company. We’ve done the testing to know what it takes to get your site listed at the top, and we’re willing to put in all of the effort to ensure that you get a site that performs the way you want.
