Gifts cataloguer Virginia Hayward has unveiled a refreshed
website to help drive year-round sales. The company, which sells
traditional hampers, fair-trade products, Duchy Originals gifts,
wines, spirits and flowers to other businesses as well as
directly to consumers, produces an annual catalogue that caters
primarily for the Christmas trading period.
“The website keeps our profits alive during the rest of the
year and provides income on our year-round range of hampers and
gifts,” marketing manager Alex Walker explained. The new
site, built by Imaginet, links to Virginia Hayward’s back-end
distribution system, allowing users to track orders at each stage
of the process. It also supports multiple delivery addresses and
enables customers to add a personalised message to their hamper
order.
As part of the relaunch, Virginia Hayward implemented a number of
search engine optimisation tactics to boost traffic. For one
thing, it changed the naming conventions of its URLs, basing each
one on a product name. In addition, “we realised that we
had an enormous amount of content on the website that we weren’t
making the most of,” Walker said. “So as an ongoing
process, we review each of our pages and make sure that every
element works for us”, which includes ensuring that images
are alt tagged and image names contain keywords.
“It’s important to get right down into the site code and
not miss an opportunity to use your keywords,” Walker said.
“Our ultimate aim is to have our position in Google
accurately reflect our place in the hamper market. We would
really like to see first-page placements on our main key
phrases.” To this end, Virginia Hayward is working to get
the site featured in directory submissions and blogs and to
receive quality links from other websites.
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