Company: Whirling Dervishes

Software: Alpha ZIP

Website: www.alphazip.com

Scenario: Alpha ZIP was a new compression tool with great potential. The problem was that the market was already overrun with compression software. The only way to stand out was to perform well on the search engines. For a new website, this was not an easy task. With established sites and products occupying the top rankings for all the obvious keywords and phrases, it did not look as if Alpha ZIP stood a chance of receiving any traffic from the engines for a very long time.

Strategy: Rather than fighting an uphill battle and wasting time trying to attain great rankings for generic phrases such as "file compression", we suggested that targeting more focused terms would be the best strategy for the time being. We created a number of new pages which dealt with specific file and archive types, knowing that this was one of Alpha ZIP's strengths - but the competition on the search engines would be smaller, so the chances of ranking highly were much greater.

Results: The results were incredible. The new pages soon shot to the top of Google for their targeted phrases, and started bringing in a high volume of traffic. Because these keyword phrases were so targeted, it was not surprising that this traffic also converted to downloads.

Within five months, the pages we had created were bringing in several hundred visitors a day - and almost 40% of those visitors were downloading the product. In the meantime, the website is also starting to rank highly for the more generic phrases. By targeting so-called "small" phrases in the beginning, we managed to ensure that the website received traffic during that vital early period.

"I once read the opinion that you would have to be crazy to come out with another compression utility, unless you had a multi million dollar budget for advertising. In this crowded market, simply having a good product is clearly not enough. But we did not have a multi million dollar budget. We did, however, call the help of Reach Promotions, who made it happen for us. I only recommend them to my friends, as a secret weapon to beat the competition."
Henk Devos, Whirling Dervishes