This is a guest post that was submitted to me and after reading the headline I could not resist. Case studies are always a good idea. And as an SEO consultant I could appreciate this webmaster’s approach to link building. And this makes me more than happy to publish his content, with a link! Enjoy.
Keywords: APlumbers
Description: The famous conversation between Barack Obama and Joe the Plumber placed the plumber’s name and city visited by him high up in leading search engines. Consequently APlumbers was pushed down the list of search results. This article discusses how APlumbers overcame this obstacle with a successful site promotion strategy.
Background:
My name is Elad and I am head of the marketing and promotion team of aplumbers.com. This site has been developed over a six month period, and is now regarded as a leading site with high quality, original and informative plumbing content used by plumbers and customers alike.
The year is 2008, and campaigns for US Presidency are under way. During a campaign stop in Ohio on the 12th of October of that year, Barack Obama was confronted about his small business tax policies by an anonymous plumber by the name of Joe Wurzelbacher. The conversation between Obama and Wurzelbacher, later famously nicknamed “Joe the Plumber” only lasted 5:37 minutes but gained Wurzelbacher international fame.
We launched APlumbers just before this famous confrontation. Our publicity efforts to promote APlumbers on search engines became that much more difficult following the short conversation between the candidate for presidency and the plumber. Why so?
Shortly after his conversation, Joe Wurzelbacher received close to 829,000 references on Google, some of which appeared on leading American news sites such as CNN, New York Times, Fox New, ABC News, Huffington Post, and other prominent worldwide newspapers. Almost every city visited by Wurzelbacher received press coverage in top newspapers, and that publicity pushed the plumber’s name + the visited city to the top of the search results on leading search engines.
What is the Common Denominator between Barack Obama, Joe the Plumber and APlumbers?
APlumbers ranking on search engines suffered following Wurzelbacher’s publicity. To overcome damage done to the promotion efforts of our site, we decided to adopt a promotion strategy that involved extensive research, continuous high quality content maintenance and regular update informs; not to mention the proper allocation of financial resources. We had begun writing and distributing a vast range of original plumbing articles across the site. The addition of new content not only helped us tap into a wider range of search words by which people arrived at our sites, and also receive quality referrals from outside sources that quoted us.
We believe that maintaining updated, and informative content is the best way to beat the kind of “threat” not intentionally posed by the famous conversation between President Obama and Joe the Plumber.
