This cutting edge SEO strategy wasn’t about impressions, clicks or conversions.  It was about preserving the Search equity associated with a proliferation of micro-sites targeted at disparate market segments.

It signifies a liberation for marketers: a way to leverage their past efforts and capitalizes on their Search investment. This campaign was a historic winner at this years BMA international Pro-Comm awards in the on air/online category.

Problem:

Consolidation of Multiple Web Sites Threatens to Diminish Organic Search Visibility, Rankings and Traffic

Target Audience:
•    Commercial/Residential Building Materials Professionals
o    Architects, Product Specifyers, Builders, Distributors, Contractors

Media Considerations:
•    Search Engine Spiders
o    Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK, etc

Objective:
•    Increase search footprint for Johns Manville
•    Negate the threat of lost organic search traffic

In 2007, Johns Manville moved aggressively to consolidate ten audience/product specific responder web sites into one at SpecJM.com to maximize their online presence across the Commercial/Residential Building Materials marketplace. The goal was to combine online marketing resources across JM’s Roofing and Insulation divisions for a consistent brand experience, while creating an industry leading product specification web site. The corresponding search effort focused on maintaining and then growing established organic search engine visibility, rankings and traffic for the JM brand. The primary concern centered on overcoming the potential loss of current search visibility, which drove target audiences via organic search to responder web sites across business divisions.

Strategy:
•    Leverage web site consolidation to accelerate the growth of search visibility for Johns Manville, while negating the threat of lost organic search traffic due to relocating established search positioned content.
•    Methodically architect a web site migration strategy that would aggregate previous search marketing gains with additional content tailored to cover the Commercial/Residential Building Materials Professionals audiences.
•    Consolidate existing responder web sites by indexing, mapping and then rerouting the current 660+ search engine indexed pages of web content to repositioned content on SpecJM.com without a downturn in organic search driven traffic.

Results:
Driven by successful web site consolidation, Johns Manville’s total organic search traffic grew by 83% from 2006 to 2007.  Search efforts seamlessly re-captured top 10 search rankings for category specific terms such as “Pipe Insulation” and “Duct Board”, which had previously held search visibility for JM responder sites. 

In total, organic search traffic increased by 46% above and beyond the expected pick-up and lift of search traffic from the ten previous responder sites within a three month period. Johns Manville’s search footprint increased overall with a 229% increase in search terms, driving traffic through 148% additional entry pages from Q1 to Q4. As a direct result, Commercial/Residential Building Materials Professionals requesting immediate sales contact by Johns Manville increased by 40% from 2006 to 2007.