The Brush Guys

The client is an online seller of paint brushes. There are brushes for all artists of different levels of experience. The client has established a reputation of providing high quality brushes and fast shipping (even internationally) according to multiple verified reviewers. For a lot of people,there’s only one place to shop for brushes and that’s with this client.

The website, content, and SEO all appeared to be from the 1990s/2000s. At my agency we were tasked with a full on redesign to bring them up to the latest appearances and practices. The majority of my responsibilities focused on the content and SEO side of this redesign. On top of that, the client has aspirations to beat out one of his biggest competitors, Blick Art Supplies.

It’s one thing to move a small website that has about 10 or less pages and just a few products to a modern look. It’s an entirely different challenge to do the same thing when the website has hundreds of products. Yes, that’s correct hundreds. That’s a lot of content to improve and optimize.

The solution was an in-depth content audit at the very beginning of this process. This served to help with the static pages of the website. After auditing the existing content, the next step was to do keyword research based on the brand interview completed by the client. Research was done on keywords, proof terms, and content the high profile competitors had that the old website didn’t. For the on-site SEO the audit and research helped prepare the assignments to the copywriters.

There was a matter of the technical SEO which was lacking before the redesign. The only aspect that was consistent over the redesign was the site structure, although we did have to expand to add a blog feature. The most important reason the site structure stayed consistent was to avoid link rot with their existing products. They previously did not have a sitemap uploaded to search engines which we were able to remedy. Their 404 page was non-existent until we added one as part of the redesign. A CDN and caching program were setup to make sure a site of this size would still load fast.

Visitors poured in after launch, sales were going as smooth as before. The number of keywords where the client ranks in top positions grew over the first 3 months to all time highs. Users were spending a lot of time reading the static pages we crafted, with times ranging from 8 minutes to 15 minutes in some cases.

Not only was client’s website easier to find, it was also easy to stay glued either browsing products or reading the content we had provided.