SMI

Lawrence Kinlin School of Business
Marketing Management
Community Consultancy – VEB 2016
Submitted by: Pratik Deshpande
Faculty In-Charge – Liz Gray & Sherry McEvoy

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Table of Content
Executive Summary…………………………………………………………………………… 2
Challenges……………………………………………………………………………………… 4
Key Results…………………………………………………………………………………….. 5
Recommendation……………………………………………………………………………… 6
Product Portfolio………………………………………………………………………………. 7
Etsy……………………………………………………………………………………………... 9
Paid Search Advertising……………………………………………………………………....12
Social Media…………………………………………………………………………………....19
Facebook……………………………………………………………………………… 20
Pinterest……………………………………………………………………………….. 23
UX Testing ……………………………………………………………………………………..24
Influencer Outreach………………………………………………………………………….. 27
Technical SEO Audit…………………………………………………………………………. 28
Summary of SEO Recommendation……………………………………………………….. 47

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Executive Summary
For the VEB course of 2016, we were given the responsibility of creating a digital
marketing campaign for SMI Ventilation Products Inc. The goal of this campaign was to
design a strategy that would help in creating brand awareness and generate sales. On
further research and investigation of the company, we realized there was much more than
just awareness and sales that we had to concentrate on. This report discusses in length
about few challenges that were to be taken care of while creating the strategy.
The report gives an in depth summary of all the activities that we did as part of the VEB
strategy. The campaign began with identifying the challenges like low brand awareness,
limited distribution channels and social media to name a few. This is followed by creating
the product portfolio which was much needed to revamp the products page for SMI. The
new pictures are set to be used in various social media platforms and also in products
listing page of Etsy.com.
Etsy.com is the new e-commerce channel that is established for SMI. In a short span of
3 months the shop has successfully attracted over 2700 prospective customers and made
7 sales resulting in revenue worth $265 USD. The Google AdWords campaign was also
a part of the strategy and was used to drive traffic to the Etsy shop of SMI. The AdWords
campaign was successful in attracting over 1000 clicks and get over 94,000 impressions.
Social media played a big role in driving traffic to the website and Etsy page. The company
did not have a social media presence in the past. The accounts existed but no activity
was made. We took over the accounts (Facebook and Pinterest) and attracted 161 Likes
on Facebook page and also had successful display ads.
The report also discusses about the User Experience Testing done to gauge the
qualitative analysis of the website. A combination of peer evaluation and usertesting.com
results were used to draw conclusions. Last part of the campaign was the SEO Audit
which was conducted in order to provide SEO insights to SMI to optimize their website’s
On-page and Off-page parameters to rank higher organically in Google SERP.
Finally the total expense incurred to carry out this VEB Campaign for SMI Ventilation
Products Inc. is given in the table below.

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Item Cost
Google AdWords $878.41
Photo Shoot $280
Pagemodo 1 Year Subscription $51.00
Facebook Ads $170
Misc. $200.00
Total $1,579.81

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Challenges
During the VEB course, I was expected to use or implement various types of Digital
Marketing Strategies, to try and solve or mitigate the challenges the company faces in its
daily business routine. SMI Ventilation Products Inc. had a few challenges and limitations
of its own and we had find the most suitable and cost effective solution to overcome these
challenges.
 Low brand awareness
The company had very low brand awareness in the market. The customers do not
know about the company nor do they identify the brand name. Therefore the most
important challenge there was to spread awareness about SMI Vents.
 Limited distribution channels
The company website hosts the product listings but the customers cannot
purchase the products from the SMI website. The customer is taken to a third-party
website like Home Depot or HVAC Quick to finalize the sale.
 Low Social Media presence
The company had very little presence on Social Media. There were business
profiles on Facebook and Pinterest but the accounts were inactive since a very
long time. Therefore reviving the social media was one such task that was a part
of this VEB course for SMI
 No Marketing or Brand Promotion Activity
The company is just over 1 year old and since then very little was done to market
the product in the digital space. As the product is available only through online
channel partners there was no promotional efforts been made to encourage
customers to buy SMI Ventilations products. As part of the VEB course, promoting
the products of SMI through Digital Marketing was also important.

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Key Results
The VEB Digital marketing campaign was implemented from January 2016 and lasted
for four months. During this period various digital marketing efforts were made, some for
the first time while some were picked up from where they were left and optimized. The
overall aim and motive of the campaign was to drive customers to the website
(awareness) and generate sales. Therefore we tracked this change in Google Analytics
and the data below is the exact comparison of same period last year.
The results clearly show over 200% increase in sessions and new users. The Bounce
rate has gone done by 13.02% and the most important is the conversion (clicks on HVAC
Quick link or clicks on Home Depot link) achieved through each traffic source. Another
key result is creation of a new traffic source through social channel. In 2015, SMI had 0%
traffic from Social as compared to 14% traffic share in 2016.
In terms of sales, Etsy generated a total of 7 orders (12 vents) worth $265 USD with 2741
shop visits and 24 customers marking SMI shop as favorite on Etsy.

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Recommendations
Based on the VEB campaign for SMI Ventilations Products, we would like to make some
recommendations for the future. These recommendations are a result of the various
experiments, tests and their findings carried out during the course.
 SMI should continue to use Etsy.com as a channel to increase sales. There is
potential in the e-commerce website which was not fully taken advantage of in last
4 months.
 Optimization of the AdWords account. SMI should dedicate some time and effort
into optimizing the AdWords account that was created during this VEB course. The
combination of AdWords and Etsy has proved to be a real success in just 4 months.
Nurturing it and taking it ahead will result in a positive ROI.
 Maintaining social media presence. SMI should assign a minimum of 1 hour every
week for its social media activity. It is imperative in today’s digital age that we
create an online community for ourselves and keep the interaction and
conversation going.
 SMI must consider developing influencer outreach as the company needs more
visibility and awareness to increase sales. This will not only increase sales but will
also improve the back link profile of the website and result in higher domain
authority.
 UX and SEO improvements. SMI must finally concentrate on improving the user
experience of its website. Also, the website must be optimized for all the SEO
related problems and errors that are discussed in the report.

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Product Portfolio
The SMI website was the only source or POS where the products were being listed if
customers wanted to purchase them. Also at the end of the process they would get
transferred on to either Home Depot or HVAC Quick depending on the customer’s choice.
The featured product images that were used were not engaging enough to showcase
their real potential. The images were just white vents which did not bring out the true
beauty of the creative designs of the vents. This gave rise to the need of creating a brand
new product portfolio. Here are some pictures that are on the website and are still on the
Products page.
We decided to develop a profile which would not only bring out the product features but
will also give a contextual perspective to the customers of how would the vents look after
they are installed on the walls. The ‘product – in – action’ plan was made possible by the
efforts of Prof Gray and Prof McCovoy as they made arrangements for suitable houses
where the photo shoot of these vents can be done. We hired a proffessional photgrapher
and the shoot was conducted on a Saturday morning at 4 different locations. Below are
some shots that were clicked.

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We were able to finalize on over 90 product shots which showcased the different possible
places where the vents could be installed and how they enhanced the look of the entire
home décor. This portfolio was developed at a very small amount of $280. These pictures
were then used on Etsy, Facebook and Pinterest. We would recommend SMI to update
their website products listings with these new pictures as they communicate a whole lot
about their features and creative beauty.

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ETSY
As discussed in the previous sections about the challenge that SMI faced with limited
distribution channel for its products, we had to find a solution where the products can be
easily made available to the customers apart from Home Depot and HVAC Quick
websites. The idea was not only to add one more point of sale for SMI but also reduce
the over-head cost of hosting the products on a third party website. While doing extensive
research on available options, we came across a website called Etsy.com.
ETSY is known to build an online community for creative entrepreneurs and helps them
to create a market place of their own. The website enables the business person to host
the products on the website while retaining the brand name unlike Home Depot. This
came across as the best option for SMI as the product is very creative and definitely could
find its own unique place on a site like Etsy.
The following screen grab is of the SMI shop that we setup on Etsy.com. The new product
pictures that were clicked were used to give a contextual perspective to customers. The
Etsy profile also gave us the option to track the traffic sources to the shop much like
Google Analytics. The reports and figures tracked gave a decent idea to gauge the traffic
trends and track sales figures.
The shop was set in the third week of January 2016, and since then we made a lot of
changes to the account in terms of the product images and getting them featured in Etsy
listings. This is the most successful strategy that we used in the VEB for SMI Vents as
we were able to create a brand identity for SMI and also generate sales through this
channel. Below is the image of how the Etsy shop for SMI Vents looks like.

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Also here are some product listings on the shop
The Etsy shop proved to be a great way to showcase the product offering while keeping
the Brand name intact. Home Depot and HVAC Quick do not allow to use the brand name
SMI while featuring the product. In e-commerce business it is very important that our
product is not just identified but also remembered and for that having a brand identity is
of prime importance. Etsy enabled us to create that for SMI. Below are the sales figures
for as of 16th April, 2016

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The above screen captures also shows us the number of times the shop was viewed
since the creation of the account. 2738 people either viewed our shop or the product
listing, out of which 24 marked us as Favourites. This is a major success for SMI in terms
of brand awareness. Let us focus on 24 people who marked us as Favourites, these are
our most potential future buyers as they are deep down into the sales funnel and just one
step away from hitting the check-out option for the vents.
Recommendation
Looking at the performance of the shop on Etsy.com we highly recommend that the
company must continue to take advantage of this channel to drive more sales.
Furthermore, having a good mix of multiple POS is also important as the company
distribution channel would get diversified and more target audience can be reached thus
increasing the SMI sales. Not just that Etsy gives an option to communicate with
customers directly and answer to their questions and queries.
Etsy and AdWords
In the next section, we will discuss how we connected our Etsy shop to the Google
AdWords campaign to drive traffic to the shop. This decision was made with the idea to
give an opportunity to the users to close the sale without taking them to a different website
for making the payment. Also this inter linking could be easily tracked and measured. The
chart below shows how Google AdWords was successful in driving major traffic to the
Etsy shop.

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Paid Search Advertising
Paid search is an online marketing technique through which marketers advertise their
products and listing with a search engine or their partner website for a cost. This cost can
be of two types, in simple terms there could be a cost for each time the ad gets clicked
(CPC) or for each time the ad get displayed (CPM)
Cost-Per-Click - This is the cost that you as the advertiser would pay each time the ad
gets a click from the user through a SERP. This method of payment is usually for Text
Ads running on the selected search engine (Google, Bing) and their search partner
networks.
Cost-Per-Impression (CPM) - This is the cost that the advertiser would pay for every 1000
time the ad is displayed or appears on the SERP. The cost is not on the click-through-
rate as the cost is incurred only on impressions. This method of payment is for Display
Ads running on the selected search engine and their search partner networks.
Google AdWords
For the purpose of this course we chose Google AdWords as a platform for paid search
advertising as it is the most popular and has wide reach.
AdWords offers both PPC and Display advertising and allows the advertisers to set their
own budget and bids for each of their ads. Advertisers also have the option to create
niche targets for the campaigns they create on basis of different demographics,
geographic and psychographics of their audience.
Google AdWords Campaign has four main components:
1. Ad Development
2. Keyword Planning
3. Budget and Bidding
4. Target Settings

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Ad Development
Ad Development consist of creating text ads with relevant texts and call-to-action to make
users click on the text ad once it shows up on the serp. The Ad copy looks like the
following image.
The Headline has a character limit of 25 and the Description Line 1 and 2 have 35
character limit. The display URL can be 25 character long. The Display URL can be a
non-functional URL and can be used for keyword stuffing. The Final URL is the actual
landing page where the advertiser wants the users to land after clicking. The Ad Copy
must include the keywords that would trigger the ad and also have a call-to-action to
motivate the users to click the ad.
Keyword Planning
This is the most important part of the campaign creation. The keywords in the campaign
are the reason the ads would get triggered in the AdWords platform, therefore choosing
effective and relevant plays vital role in campaigns performance. There advertiser must
identify and research in depth about the users search online and what competition ads
get triggered on those search. On the basis of that ads must be categorised as per match
type of Broad, Phrase or Exact match type.
Budget and Bidding
After finalising the keywords that will be used for the Ad Group, setting a daily budget and
making the correct bids is the next step. There are two ways an advertiser can set up a

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bidding process, Manual or Auto. Manual Bidding allows us to adjust the bid manually
according to the campaign performance while Auto lets Google decide the best bid for
the ads.
Target Settings
The AdWords interface allows the user to make some very niche choices when it comes
to targeting. We can target our customers based on their location, language, sex, age
and also the devices that they use. Therefore one can get very detailed to weed out the
unwanted traffic.
SMI Ventilations Campaign
As part of the paid advertising effort, we decided that the ETSY page for SMI must be the
landing page that should be promoted. The landing page URL was therefore the Etsy
shop for SMI. The SMI website (Product Page) was the first choice for the landing page
URL, but as the customers will be directed to a third party website to complete the sale
tracking and measuring the success was a big challenge. Also credibility was another
challenge as users could get confused when they get redirected to a third party website
to complete the transaction.
We decided to create one campaign called SMI Vents on Search Network only. The
campaign had the following hierarchy:
SMI Vents (Campaign)
1. Baseboard Vents (Ad Groups)
2. Cold Air Returns
3. Decorative Cold Air Returns
4. Wall Mount Grille
The table below gives a brief synopsis of the campaign performance for the period of Jan
2016 to April 2016

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Interactions Impressions
Interaction
rate
Avg. Cost Cost
1043 94617 1.10% CA$0.84 CA$878.41
While deciding the campaign for the company, we decided to break down the campaign
on the basis of keywords and search queries made online related to ‘cold air returns’ and
on what products does the company has. The campaign was set to target the US and
Canada as whole as the company would ship products across North America.
AD Group Performance
The campaign had four ad groups which are listed below.
The above screen shot gives the performance of the ad groups within the campaign. The
numbers suggests that Decorative Cold Air Returns ad group attracted maximum clicks
of 766. It has the highest CTR of 1.36% and also has a CPC of $0.83. ‘Wall Mount Grille’
ad group also had a CTR of 1.35% which shows that in real time, if optimization is further
improved for this ad group it has the potential to attract more clicks and perform better.
As whole, the campaign was moderately successful in the given time period of 4 months.
We would recommend that with full time attention and longer period of optimization
AdWords can prove to be a very useful channel for SMI products promotion.

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Keywords Performance
The keywords for the campaign varied from Exact to broad match type. A total of 207
keywords were added to this campaign. Below is a chart of the top 10 keywords and their
relative performance in the campaign.
Keyword
Ad group Clicks Impressions CTR
Avg.
CPC
"decorative cold air return"
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 1 3 33.33% 0.93
decorative cold air return
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 1 4 25.00% 0.62
"decorative air return"
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 1 7 14.29% 1
cold air grill covers
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 1 11 9.09% 0.86
floor and wall registers Wall Mount Grille 1 13 7.69% 0.78
decorative return air filter grille
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 3 44 6.82% 0.83
modern air vent
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 2 32 6.25% 0.79
"cold air return vent covers"
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 5 80 6.25% 0.96
designer air vents
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 4 72 5.56% 0.92
wall air registers Wall Mount Grille 1 18 5.56% 0.95
This chart above shows the more relevant keywords as they are ranked as per their Click-
Through-Rate (CTR). We can infer that tracking on Etsy is not perfect. In an ideal world
we would know exactly what kind of ROI we’re getting from each keyword and this is only
achievable when you sell from your own site – a fairly cost effective endeavor SMI might
want to undertake now as they know selling outside of HVAC and Home Depot online is
possible. Having a high CTR also improves the Quality score of the keyword and helps
in reducing the CPC. Let us now look at the keywords that were more popular in terms of
clicks.

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Keyword
Ad group Clicks Impressions CTR
Avg.
CPC
air vent covers
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 163 13977 1.17% 0.77
vent covers
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 80 10470 0.76% 0.82
floor cold air return vent covers
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 75 3490 2.15% 0.8
decorative cold air return vent covers
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 63 2803 2.25% 0.8
wall vent covers Wall Mount Grille 32 1102 2.90% 0.81
air return vent covers decorative
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 28 1125 2.49% 0.97
wall air vent covers
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 24 1403 1.71% 0.8
return air vent covers
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 22 470 4.68% 0.8
decorative air vents
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 21 1561 1.35% 0.81
decorative vent covers
Decorative Cold Air
Returns 21 1576 1.33% 0.78
The above table shows the keywords that drove maximum traffic. These results suggest
that keywords with the terms ‘Decorative Vents’ and “Air Vent Covers” perform better as
compared to others. In future SMI should concentrate on segmenting the campaign based
on these keywords that perform and attract major traffic to the campaign. These keywords
need more time to nurture and optimize and for sure they will yield a higher ROI in the
long run of the campaign.
Ad Performance
Two ad groups Baseboard Vents and Wall Mount Grille had one ad each while Cold Air
Returns and Decorative Cold Air Returns had two and three ads respectively. Close
attention was paid while writing and designing these ads. We tried to embed as many
relevant keywords as possible into the ad text that might trigger the ad or was likely to be

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searched by the target audience. The motive was to make the ads more relevant to the
search query as possible. The following screenshot shows us the top 5 ads in the
campaign.
The most popular ad that had the most success in driving clicks was the Decorative Cold
Air Vents ad. It had the highest clicks of 766 and CTR of 1.36%. The ad although had a
low Avg. Position or Ad Rank. Several reasons affect the Ad Rank of an ad including the
keyword relevancy and landing page. As part of the learning experience we were able to
improve the performance by a small margin only, but these results are good evidence
that there is a lot of scope for SMI Vents to promote their products through AdWords with
further optimization of the campaigns. In the end the AdWords campaign was successful
in generating sales worth $220 USD.

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Social Media
It is important that small businesses actively use social media marketing efforts in order
to gain brand awareness in their respective industry. Having a presence on multiple social
media accounts allows a business to be easily accessible for all current and prospective
customers. Additionally, multiple social media accounts can further create new
opportunities for reaching a wider range of audiences and consequently increasing
conversion rate. Lastly, social media is beneficial for small businesses as it can build a
valuable relationship between a business and its target market by starting and
participating in a conversation with customers online.
Social Media for SMI Vents
SMI had two accounts on popular social media websites Facebook and Pinterest. Even
though the accounts were created there was very little or no activity on these accounts to
engage with the online community. As one of the challenges for SMI in VEB was social
media presence and brand awareness we took over the accounts on Facebook and
Pinterest and gave them a 360 degree makeover.

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Facebook
We used Facebook as a medium to build an online community for SMI, where we could
communicate and promote our products. We used both the organic as well as the paid
option on Facebook to promote the SMI page and the website.
Few of the posts that were posted for organic traffic are listed in the screen below.
The post highlighted in the above screen was able to have the highest engagement
(Likes, Comments and Shares) with the users online. The data in Google Analytics
show in the screenshot below suggests that the posts which had smivents.com/products
as their landing resulted in 121 new sessions.
Below are the examples of Facebook paid display ads that drove traffic to the website
directly. The GA data shows us that this ad resulted in 53 new sessions on the home
page of the SMI website which was the landing page for this ad.

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Here is the detailed snapshot of the traffic data from GA that was triggered by Facebook.
This above data also shows us that not only did the Facebook campaign resulted in
93.57% new traffic between Feb 2016 to April 2016 but also had 6 users click on the
Home Depot/ HVAC check out buttons on the website. We do not have the ability to track
the actions of the users after they have left the SMI website but it would safe to assume
that we were successful in taking the customer right to the end of the sales funnel.

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This above screen is of another paid ad which was run to drive traffic to the Etsy page.
Although we cannot say for sure as how many people landed on the Etsy URL through
this ad, but the post reached over 11000 people online and also created few
conversations on the page posts. The Etsy traffic data shows about 240 users landed on
Etsy shop via Facebook.
Recommendations for SMI
Going ahead we would advise SMI to spend at least an hour every week to maintain the
Facebook page of SMI Vents. There is a huge community on Facebook which can be
targeted to convert them in potential customers. SMI can post pictures and testimonials
from some houses that have SMI Vents installed which can act as a catalyst to influence
the audience. The results discussed also show that Facebook paid ads are good source
to attract highly targeted traffic to the website.

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Pinterest
The company already had the Pinterest account which was taken over by us at the
beginning of the VEB course. Although we tried to create few boards on Pinterest using
a mix of old and new pictures of the Vents, we were not successful in attracting followers
on this platform. Here are the snap shots of few boards created on Pinterest as part of
this exercise. SMI should continue posting pictures and boards on this platform and also
pin boards from other influencer accounts that have home décor as their main profile
theme.

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UX Testing
User Experience (UX) is a qualitative evaluation of a user’s thoughts, feelings, and
emotions as they interact with a website. Most visitors to a website will have a specific
purpose or goal they intend to complete upon landing on the homepage therefore
optimizing user experience involves understanding how the user progresses through the
website and the proficiency to which they can accomplish their goals.
When a business tries to understand how their customer-base consumes a product
or service, they map out the buyer’s cycle that their potential customers are likely to
progress through before they become a source of revenue. The buyer’s cycle generally
begins with a research phase where a customer seeks out information about a product
or service. Today’s consumer is very likely to engage with a businesses’ online touch-
point at the beginning or at some point in the buyer’s cycle. Combine this with the
frequency that today’s consumer uses a mobile device and you have a reality where a
business' online presence speaks volumes to their overall reputability as a company.
Additionally, as website architecture continues to evolve and trends develop, users visit
your website with expectations about its appearance, navigability, and how easy it will be
to accomplish their goals. A website should at least meet these expectations or else run
the risk of turning away the user to a competitor.
For the purpose of SMI website user experience testing, we did two types of evaluations
for the website smivents.com. First evaluation was in-class peer evaluation where my
colleagues evaluated the website and its features and gave their feedback, second was
an audit performed via usertesting.com. The users were given a set of questions and
navigation guidelines for the evaluations. Below are the list of questions given for
usertesting.com evaluation.

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The results and feedback of the above exercise and those from the peer evaluation are
listed below:
 Website is easy to navigate and gives a positive feel
 The first glance tells us about the company and the products
 Need more information about products along with the photos
 Checkout option on the website itself instead of third party link
 Users want to read reviews and testimonials
 Users are looking for products pictures which are either 3D model or installed in
some homes for better understanding
 Product Purchase/Return information on the website
 The website was rated an average of 6.5 on 10 for overall experience
The entire recorded version of the user testing will be made available in the USB stick
along with the report.

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How to Optimize UX: SMI
An important question to ask yourself when trying to provide an optimized UX is
“Have I created a website that makes my offering appear reputable, professional, and
more memorable than competitors?”
Strategies for providing a user with a positive, memorable UX will differ from site-
to-site depending on the goal of the website. For example, for a website like SMI which
is an e-commerce site, the strategy of providing good UX should aim to make it easy to
browse products, shop for what users need, and eventually complete a purchase. In
addition to this, a website that makes a user feel good enough about purchasing that they
will return the website has provided a valuable UX. By understanding the specific goal(s)
of our website, the tactics needed to provide the user with a good UX can be developed
in a way that makes achieving those goals a simple process.
Few recommendations that SMI can implement on their website should be:
 Make the product listing page more detailed with new pictures and give the option
to filter the products
 Create a shopping cart where customers can save their selections
 Implement ‘Check-Out’ option on the website itself
The easier you make it on your user, the less likely it is that they will abandon your
site before they become a profitable customer. Therefore a major part of providing a good
UX is to have a shopping cart within the website. Making the person move to a third party
webpage increases the purchase cycle time and we might end up losing the customer.
An optimized UX can also require providing a pleasing visual layout that presents
the website in an effective way. Many users are just looking for relevant information
aligned with their needs; if they are able to find this information quickly on the site, they
are much more likely to see our business as an authority on the matter and return to your
site in times of future need.

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Influencer Out-Reach
Influencer Out-Reach or Influencer Marketing is a method through which we target our
product to specific people or group of people rather than the entire target audience. These
selected individuals are those who have influencing authority over potential buyers in the
market. These are usually celebrities, writers, bloggers or any other personality with major
online presence and fan following. Word-Of-Mouth marketing is closely related to it but
WOM is usually organic in nature while Influencer marketing is more often a paid or
planned strategy.
As part of the VEB course, our strategy to increase awareness and gain visibility was to
get SMI Vents featured in one such influencer’s blogs. We decided to target stay at home
mom bloggers and home décor bloggers as our target influencers. We used an online
tool called BuzzSumo.com to find the influencers in the genre of Home Décor and Home
Improvement bloggers. We also tried to find some ‘At Home Moms’ who blog about
various DIY options to decorate the home in a cost effective manner. We contacted about
15 influencers through email, few of them are listed below.
 http://brooklynberrydesigns.com/
 http://lindsaystephenson.com/
 http://thediydreamer.com/
 http://www.bluebirdkisses.com/
Unfortunately we are yet to hear from these individuals regarding our proposal.
SMI makes decorative cold air return covers which enhance the beauty of walls and adds decor
value to the house. I am looking to feature the product on your blog for your readers. I would be
glad if you can review our product and write a piece on it like a DIY Decor tip, that would really
work wonders for us. We are a brand new company based in Windsor ON.
I can send you few sample vent pieces for you to examine them physically if you wish. I would
appreciate if you can do our product feature on your blog. You can find us on
http://smivents.com/

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Striking a deal with these influencers takes a long time and a huge number of influencers
must be contacted to get a couple of them to respond.
Even while we were not able to get an influencer for SMI, we recommend that efforts must
be made in this direction and the company must try to get the products featured in a
magazine or blog to create an online buzz about the products.
We also tried to feature SMI products in a query on HARO.com. The requirement suited
SMI perfectly. It was for Inspirations and Celebrations, an online lifestyle guide for women
and required tips to beautify and update homes for spring in a very affordable way.
Technical SEO Audit
Technical SEO Audit is a comprehensive testing of the site’s performance with respect to
its organic ranking on Google’s search engine results page otherwise called the SERP.
A SEO site audit is a critical first step that SEOs must undertake to understand the state
of SEO. There are three critical areas that will be covered in this audit for SMI Ventilations
Product Inc.
1. Technical site Audit
2. On Page SEO Audit
3. Link Audit
Ranking Snapshot as Of March 30, 2016 Source – MOZ
The table below gives the keyword ranking for SMI for 10 keywords that are directly
associated with the product it sells. These keywords are scored on National level currently
as they provide services to the entire North America.

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Keywords Location
Current
Rank
SMI Vents National #1
cold air return vents National #51+
Decorative Cold Air Return National #51+
Decorative wall vents National #51+
decorative cold air return vent
covers
National #51+
Baseboard Vent Covers National #51+
wall air vent covers National #51+
Decorative Baseboard National #51+
Cold Air Return Covers National #51+
Decorative Vents National #51+
(Table 1)
The company is ranking low on its keywords apart from the branded keyword SMI Vents
which ranks on top of the SERP. Other competitors show up on the first page of the SERP
for generic keywords listed above in the table. SMI does not show up in this list, which
implies there is room for improvement on keyword usage in multiple places on the website
to drive google page rank. The screen grab below shows the competition brand Imperial
Group on the top page where SMI Vents does not appear for the keyword search ‘Cold
Air Returns’.

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Traffic Acquisition Snapshot
Source – Google Analytics – SMI Ventilations Products Inc. (30th
March 2015 – 30th
March 31, 2016)
Traffic acquisition is nothing but the knowing where the traffic to the website came from.
There are various sources through which a user can land on our website. For example
user can find the link on social media or can type the URL direct into the browser or the
website could be reached through a search engine results page. The below chart gives
us a glimpse of the traffic source for SMI Vents.
Competition Company – Imperial Group

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There are four different types of sources that can be seen on the chart above
1. Referral – This traffic is identified when a user clicks on a link on a website to go
to a landing page of another website. The above GA data for last 1 year shows
about 45.05% traffic to this website was driven through Referrals. But upon closer
look at the various referral links through which this traffic came from, some
surprising facts are revealed. Below screenshot shows the breakdown of this
traffic.
All of the links above which drive traffic look spam. Usually all websites attract some kind
of spam traffic but this data is alarming as the traffic accounts to 45% of the total traffic
for the last one year. Therefore to avoid such bot traffic from affecting the GA results SMI
Vents must use the Bot filtering feature in Google Analytics.

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This setting must be checked by the account holder to filter down the above traffic. This
setting is found under the Admin -> View Column -> View Setting -> Bot Filtering
2. Organic – This is the traffic which is generated through SERP. Which means users
were looking for specific keywords on Google which brought them to the website.
The above table shows that 31% of the traffic came from this source. Even though
31% may seem like a good figure SMI Vents lacks the organic page ranking
This above data is sourced from Moz.com and this shows the page score on the
basis of the keywords that are tracked in Table 1. This score is directly related to
how well-optimized the landing page on the basis of relevant keywords is. Also to
take the example of the keyword “Cold Air Returns” the website has no use of this
keyword making it impossible for the page to rank higher in organic search.
3. Direct Traffic – This traffic is a result of user typing the URL directly into the browser
or when they click on the bookmark of the website to access the site directly. These
are just two basic ways Google tracks direct traffic while in reality the scope of
direct traffic is much higher. When users access a website URL from an email or
phone app or PDF document or a shortened URL they are all considered as direct
traffic and because Analytics has no other bucket to put them under they are all

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collated under Direct Traffic. This traffic for SMI Vents is at 18% and this figure is
fairly under control.
4. Social – This traffic is any user landing on the website through any kind of social
media page like Facebook or Twitter etc. Due to the absence of social media
presence of SMI Vents in the last one year is the result behind just 5% traffic
coming through this source.
Technical SEO Considerations
Content
Creating Engaging Content
The Google Page Rank algorithm takes the content of the webpage into consideration all
the time. It looks for content which engages with the customer and that is also updated
on a frequent basis. The website must be aesthetically appealing ensuring users to return
to the website in future and provide an intuitive user experience. Such website are likely
to be seen as favorable by Google. If the website has a high bounce rate which implies
webpages are low on performance and stand a chance to be penalized by Google as it’s
a sign that the user is not satisfied with what they see on the site and therefore return to
the SERP for another option.

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Choosing Target Keywords
As discussed in the above sections about the importance of page ranking on Google
Search Engine Results Page, this is directly related to targeted keywords in the content
of website. Having a strong research of keyword is the most important step in Technical
SEO that helps improve organic ranking of any page. A well-researched keyword and its
correct use in the content of the website will result in most relevant and right kind of users
onto the website which will guarantee conversions. The Google AdWords has a tool called
Shopping Cart and User Account
User Engagement Links – Blog/FAQ
Slider with contextual product
pictures
Featured Products with pricing

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the Keyword Research Tool and can be used to find out various real time keywords that
the users are searching for on Google.
The above screen grab is from a research done for ‘Cold Air Return Vents’, and the above
few keywords are searched on an average of 10 times in a month. Taking this into account
SMI Vents website must contain these keywords in the content of the landing page which
will positively affect in 2 ways. Firstly it will improve the bounce rate as users will find the
page relevant when they arrive and secondly due to reduced bounce rate the organic
page rank will also improve.

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HTML
Meta Description & Titles
Meta Tags are small text content that define the page content. They are not visible on the
webpage but are present in the HTML code of the website. The main function of the Meta
Tags is to help the search engine identify what the webpage is all about and acts as its
identifier.
Title Tag
Title tag is also one of the Meta tags but unlike Meta Tag, the content within the Title tag
is visible to the user on the browser. It is also the text which appears as the header or title
when the website appears in the SERP when a user is looking for a related keyword.
Meta Description
The name itself describes the functionality of this tag. This tag is used to give a detailed
snippet of what is the content of the webpage along with few other highlights, for e.g.:
pricing or product listing.
On taking a closer look at the other pages, it appears most of the pages do not include
Meta descriptions and Google has pulled random information from the page to fill the
space which does not accurately describe the actual content. This can be found by pulling
the HTML code of the website and look if Meta tags (Title & Description) are present or
not.
Meta Title
Meta Description

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This above screen grabs are how SMI Vents pages look on the Google SERP, It is evident
that the Meta Title and Description are missing and therefore Google substitutes that
empty space with page content.
Below here is a good example of ‘cold air return covers’ example. The website has a
catchy description and clearly describes the business and also the services offered along
with pricing.
The table below shows some possible example of Meta Description that can be added
onto the website with relevant keywords along with possible Meta Titles. (For Example
purpose only)

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Address Title Meta Description
http://smivents.com/ SMI Vents - Designer Vents For Homes
SMI Products introduce,
design, manufacture and
distribute the latest and
unique decorative cold air
return vents that will enhance
the beauty of your home.
http://smivents.com/contact/
Get In Touch To Find More About The
Decorative Vents
Contact us with your queries
and questions on how we can
help your house look more
beautiful with our unique and
paintable cold air return
grilles
http://smivents.com/products/ Explore Our Product Catalogue
Our decorative vents are
injection-molded, high impact
polystyrene (HIPS). Our
grilles are finished white and
can be painted to match the
interior of your home. Refer
to product chart for available
sizes.
http://smivents.com/company-
profile/
Our Story - SMI Vents
You no longer have to hide
the vents behind the
furniture. Know how we
engineered the designer
vents that will add life to your
walls.

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H1 Tags
<H1> tags are an important part of on page optimization as that is the first thing that a
user notices when he land on the page. Also it is the H1 tag that gives the information to
Google of what the page content is and how the Title and description are related with the
keywords in the content. It is this tag that ties everything together.
For the SMI site the H1 tags were defined as given in the table below, but they can be
made a bit more creative in order to incorporate some of the main keywords in them.
Having relevant H1 tags improves the chances of the page to be ranked on the SERP
thus improving the overall organic rank of the website.
Address H1 tag New Suggested
http://smivents.com/ Menu
SMI - Decorative Air
Vents
http://smivents.com/contact/ Contact US Question About Vents?
http://smivents.com/products/ Products
Decorative Vents
Catalogue
http://smivents.com/company-
profile/
Company Profile
SMI Vents - Our Story
On Page Copy
On Page copy is optimization of the actual content of the landing page. As it is said
“content is king” hold true for SEO. Good, relevant and engaging content ranks higher in
Google search results. Therefore it is advisable to perform an extensive keyword research
before developing any content for the webpage. Once the keyword are finalized, deciding
the purpose of the webpage is important. What do you want the user to accomplish?
Develop the data around this question till the question is answered to get a unique set of
content which will set the page apart and will be keyword rich.

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The SMI website usertesting.com feedback suggests that the website needs keyword rich
content. The website lacks enough content around the ‘Decorative Cold Air Returns’
resulting in a lower page rank. Attention should be paid to develop content for pages like
‘Product’ ‘Photo Gallery’ and ‘Company Profile’ which gives detailed information about
the products and is concentrated with keywords.
Technical Site Errors
Crawl Errors
These errors are those when a certain webpage throws a HTTP error code or stops the
search engine bots from crawling the webpage. Most of the time the error that pops up is
the 404 Page Not Found. In such situation when the search engine bots are unable to
find a page because it was renamed or deleted without giving proper redirect the crawl is
stopped and results in a Crawl error. Having too many 404’s on the website affects the
organic ranking of the website as the user experience goes down.
For SMI, crawl report generated through Moz.com suggests there are currently no crawl
errors on the website.
Site Speed
User expereince is key to success of any website. Site speed is one of the factors that
provide this positive user expereince . If a page take too long to load it may directly affect
the organic rank of the website. Therefore it is important to take all the measures to make
sure site speed is maintained.
We conducted a Page speed test for SMI on (https://developers.google.com) and some
inetersting facts were seen. Here are are the screen shots with the results and some
possible tips to fix the problems.

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To summarize the suggestions given above that SMI must implement:
 Reduce server response time
 Zip all the heavy and bulky content to enable the website to load faster
 Use browser caching to save data on user device to increase load time

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 Optimize images, avoid using too large images for the website and use correct
format
 Prioritize the Above-The-Fold content. Make this data load faster, while the rest of
the content can take a bit longer
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content refers to content that is same across multiple website domains. This
causes major issues with organic page ranking as the search engine is confused with
which page to consider and which to exclude.
We ran a duplicate content test for SMI and the results were very satisfactory. There is
only 24% similar content on the website and that is also within the same website. There
is no cross domain duplicacy.
Mobile Friendly
After the recent Google algorithm update, it is now important that a website be optimized
for mobile in order to maintain a high rank in SERP. According to data for the past year,
SMI website is primarily accessed through desktop devices but mobile users are also very
active. The table below shows that about 83% of the traffic comes from desktop devices.
Mobile users contribute to 11.5%, this is still a significant number and therefore it is
importance for the website to be optimized for mobile to ensure postive user experience
is provided to them.

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Site Maps (HTML/XML)
Site maps are a hirearchial structure which lets the users and the crawlers know about
the structure of the website. These site maps are of two types HTML and XML. HTML site
maps are usually used for more simple website which let the users know about the
structure of the website and its contents. XML is more of a code level, where the entire
webpage is mapped and coded withing the webpage HTML. This XML code helps the
crawlers to identify all the webpages on a site and can help improve the organic page
rank of the site.
Domain Authority Over Time
Every website is given a score out of 100 which gives an idea of how the website perform
on the Google search engine page. This score is determined through various factors like
the backlinks to the webpage and the age of the domain etc. This domain authority is
directly related to the sites page rank. Higher the DA higher will be the page rank of the
website.
As per the data on Moz.com SMI has the score of 13. This is fairly understandable as the
website is just under 2 years old and does not have any back links or external links
attached. With time SMI, should focus on the link building techniques discussed in the
later part of the report to improve its domain authority.

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Link Building Techniques
Currently SMI has backlink from just one website which is shown below
In order to continue building back link profile it is imperative for us to look at the
competition website and analyse where they are connecting to and investigate further to
try building relationships with similar links. Here are some examples of back links of some
competitors.
The above examples are of some competition companies, SMI must focus on creating
strategic partnerships with some other website with higher domain authority that can link
to SMI which will postively affect the domain authority of SMI Vents.

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Websites Ranking for Similar Keywords
By doing a Google search for keywords related to SMI, it is beneficial to find other
organizations who rank and then use Open Site Explorer to see what other websites link
to them. Below is an example of some websites, and linking opportunities that SMI could
also take advantage of in the future. They may not be direct competition but taking a look
at their back link profile, it should give us a fair idea of who we must be targeting.
As DIY Network is linked to Travel Channel and HGTV websites. SMI must to do an in
depth search on possible online partners and focus on building their own back link profile.
Structured Data With Schema Markup
Schema Markup is refered to as a universal code which must be added to the HTML page
of the website in order to create a certain prominance for a product, price or some other
data on the website . Here are some examples of structured data with schema markup.

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For SMI, we recommend using schema markups to products, price and contact
information to increase the ability to rank on the SERP.
Content Mistakes and Broken Links
On using the website there seem to be no link that are broken or link to a wrong page.
But there are a lot of links that land on the same landing page. Products page is one such
example.
Content Issues – The website does not host a lot of text but there are many product
pictures which are outdated and do not give a whole idea to the customer about the
product. More contextual pictures should be used to give users an perspective of how the
product would look after installation.

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Summary of Recommendations
The SEO audit in this report outlines key areas that SMI may want to focus on in the near
future to improve their ranking for primary keywords and establish greater credibility
online. While SMI is currently appearing on the first page for most brand keywords, it is
important to remember that most people, and especially potential new customers, will
search for non-branded keywords and select from the top companies that rank
organically. The information below outlines the most important areas of SEO that SMI
should focus on in the coming months:
 Page Content
The website content must be updated with latest pictures and more attractive
layout. Users must be given an option to checkout on the same wesbite and allow
them to have a shopping cart.
 Meta Description and Tags
As discussed in the report earlier, descriptions for all the pages are missing which
directly affects the page rank. They should be updated at the earliest.
 Link Building
The company must increase it low Domain Authority by building back links with
other websites with high credibilty
 On Page Optimization
The website is poor in terms of keyword use. The website needs an update with
keyword rich content,
 Optimize Site Speed
The website should be fixed to improve the site speed. Fast loading websites
perform better on page rank and therefore makes it important for SMI to focus on
the same.

SMI

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