The case study below is an example of the internet marketing work that I do as part of Virtuoso, along with Mike Saunders of Sesalos. Internet marketing is a brilliant way to build your business online at a relatively low cost. It's also easily measurable and track-able, making it a marketer's dream. Contact me to find out more about how this can benefit you.

 The Virtuoso team were delighted when recently commissioned to create an internet marketing campaign for Grindrod Limited.

 This prestigious and dynamic organisation has over 100 years experience in the freight movement and related industries, providing total logistics solutions for clients.

Scope

The very first thing that was apparent from the www.grindrod.co.za website was the vast scope of the industry and the size of Grindrod, with its many subsidiary companies.

 Conducting an in-depth study of the site and the industry led Virtuoso to the following conclusions that will help Grindrod to feature high on search engines, become more user-friendly and further their company strategy using the internet.

 Keyword Selection Process

This led to a unique approach in selecting keywords to research Grindrod (and two competitor company's) ranking. The first step involved taking a 'quantitative' approach. This meant scouring every page of the site for relevant on-page keywords, as well as creating lists of 'encompassing' words - words that described the overall activities of the company at a higher level than those on the page.

 A huge list of over 600 keywords and phrases was the result. These were then run through a qualitative process and words that had little or no search on them were eliminated.  Variations on the qualitative keywords were also identified. These two lists were then combined and cleaned up to result in a list of 273 targeted keywords for Grindrod Limited, yielding a monthly average traffic volume of 23 816 331 searches.

 Google AdWords Keywords and ad placement

Another list of keywords was established for Grindrod, this time these words were relevant to and geared toward the Grindrod strategy going forward. Grindrod had specifically asked the Virtuoso team to recommend an adWords campaign as well as placement for a banner campaign.

 A list of suitable websites and media packs were supplied, focusing on respected global news sites in the shipping and general business categories, to dovetail into Grindrod's strategy.

 Size of site and landing pages

The Grindrod Limited site was very well laid out and has a great flow, especially considering the amount of information contained. The only major change needed in order to facilitate search engines and users was to create 'landing pages' for the four main Grindrod areas of business, namely shipping, trading, financial and freight.

 On Page SEO

The on page SEO for the site had been globally tagged, so Virtuoso set about with recommendation for per page metatags and meta descriptions to help searches.

 We also made URL recommendations and suggestions for image tags to increase keyword density on relevant pages.

 Off Page SEO

Virtuoso discovered that www.grindrod.co.za and grindrod.co.za were actually two different sites, with varying amounts of link backs. A '301 redirect' process recommended by Virtuoso sorts this out.

 An ongoing marketing campaign has been outlined and suggested by Virtuoso to build Grindrod's off page SEO rank and site integrity and visits. We suggested creating, publishing and supplying fresh news content in the form of press releases and articles.

 Press releases, news and RSS

Suggestions and methods of improving news presentation and anonymous subscriptions via RSS were discussed. Content suggestions such as financial indexes, latest news and podcast content were suggested, as well as the benefits behind using an RSS feed.

 Social Networking

Virtuoso explained that, while there might be an understandable concern about social networking in such a corporate environment, there are still uses and ways that social networking can be employed to achieve internet marketing goals.

 The benefits of social networking are the nature of the platform and how people relate within it, as well as the high value of the links due to the social site's popularity.

 Different types of social promotion were suggested to Grindrod, to suit different parts of the business i.e. corporate business pages, CSI Facebook Groups.

 And finally....

Virtuoso concluded that Grindrod has a fantastic website and an opportunity to really shine against competitors through improving their search rankings and placing visibly in the areas in which they are moving forward strategically. We created a one-page diagram that summarised all of the information supplied to Grindrod and the outline of action to be taken.

 We also suggest a quarterly research report be conducted to measure progress and assess ongoing strategy.

 As addendums to the report, the Virtuoso team supplied all search engine information as well as examples of the all the actions suggested.