CASE STUDY: Artisan Plating

Case Study: Artisan Plating

CASE STUDY: Artisan Plating

This month’s case study is about Artisan Plating, an interesting company in that they specialize in electroplating all kinds of precious metals. While they specialize in plating designer work, they also electroplate for government and military applications, which means they reach military-grade tolerance levels. They’ve even plated parts for NASA’s space shuttles. Pretty cool client!

I designed and developed artisanplating.com twelve years ago and then, I told David Vinson, the owner, that sites that can give something away always outperform sites that do not. After the recent Google Hummingbird update, this is still clearly the case.

Since he clearly could not give away jewelry, I suggested he give away his vast knowledge of electroplating, precious metals and metallurgy. He wrote up dozens of articles and since then, they have been linked to, ripped off, copied and discussed by his competitors, universities and scientists, globally. He’s also been a featured national speaker on metallurgy and electroplating precious metals.

The articles also played another role: they kept him on the first page of Google organically for 12 years! The reason for the redesign? After 12 years, Google’s algorithm changes finally bumped him off page one. Granted, the articles hadn’t been updated in years.

SOLUTION

For the redesign, I talked Artisan Plating into four new ideas:

  1. Mobile-first Responsive Design.
  2. A portfolio of his exquisite work.
  3. New articles on areas that his competitors seem ignorant of, but he is on top of.
  4. Contact information available on every page.

RESULTS

Site traffic has increased by over 300% and he’s getting rave reviews on the new design from his customers. We haven’t sent the pages jump back to page one of Google yet, but it’s only been two weeks and we are not using any paid media or keyword buys.

CASE STUDY: Artisan Plating


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