Site sales tanked after a few changes, what went wrong? (long post)

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by Sleepymarketer, Dec 26, 2012.

  1. #1
    This is a long one, and it deals somewhat with adwords, but the adwords forum looked like it was more about voucher buying...

    I’m trying to get some insight into what I should do next for the website I do marketing for. A little background. I’m no SEO expert but I have a degree in marketing and have been doing some small business marketing for 2 years now. Online marketing is something I want to specialize in. I still have a lot to learn, especially with organic rankings. Adwords is where my interest lies and I use it extensively, and I feel like I have a good grasp of how to use it properly.

    My extended family owns several healthcare facilities that cater to sleep disorders, and recently got into being an online distributor for a product, let’s call it “prosleep” (if there really is a prosleep product it isn’t that). They use it in their clinics and recruited me to help grow their website sales. They contracted out the building of a dedicated website for this product and launched it around August. The website was approved by the Prosleep corporate, an important thing to note. The prosleep corporate url would be something like prosleeptherapy.com. We took prosleep.net.
    I got an adwords campaign up and running within a few days. Sales exploded, adwords was doing extremely well for us. Most of our sales were coming from the keywords “prosleep” or “prosleep therapy”. After a few months of great sales, the prosleep people decided they no longer liked our website, that it used too much of their branding and not enough of our own. They made the argument that people were mistaking our site for the official site, even though they do not make sales from their website at all and they approved the site and all the branding months before. We didn’t want to mislead anyone and never set out to do that. Our site had plenty of our own branding and our own company address. We didn’t want to lose our contract so we went ahead and changed what they wanted us to change. This included moving the site to a different url and changing some of the branding from prosleep to our company name, let’s call it “sleephealthtime”. We kept the prosleep.net url as a redirect, but don’t really use it anymore. We use “sleephealthtime”, the url that was originally being used for the clinics, but never updated or used much.

    The site was down about a month while the website guy moved the site and made changes. Once everything was back up I went ahead and restarted the adwords campaign, changing the ad urls to reflect the new “sleepthealthtime” url. Same ad groups, same keywords, same ads. Website exactly the same except for the URL and the main logo (it’s now the logo for “sleephealthtime” and not “prosleep”). Sales have completely slowed to a trickle. Adwords is not producing reliable sales anymore. Despite the ads still ranking #1 or #2 among several other big name medical supply companies selling the product.

    The only thing I can think of is that the prosleep people were right, that folks really were somehow confused that our site was the “official” site and felt more comfortable placing an order. While I can totally understand that, I don’t understand how just changing the url and logo can really cut sales by 90%. At the time the site originally launched and sales were great, the site only came as high as page 3 of google for the 2 keywords listed in the second paragraph. Now the site hovers between spot 7 on page 1 and spot 2 on page 2. It rose, even though I haven’t even started any organic undertakings yet.

    I don’t know where to go from here, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed and out of my league. Wondering if the site itself needs to be changed some more, if I need to focus on organic and bring it as high as I can get it (right now the official prosleep website occupies the top 3 spots). I don’t want to start organic if people aren’t going to place an order because of something “wrong” with the website, and I’m unsure of my abilities to unseat the official site. So, help me, please. I’m just a greenhorn in way over my head.
     
    Sleepymarketer, Dec 26, 2012 IP