Brands Ive Worked With...
Aidan Eaton is a highly focused and experienced leader in digital strategy, dedicated to providing actionable lead generation results.
Implemented digital strategies, designed, developed, and optimized sites.
Awards earned across my career in advertising. My work has appeared in Forbes, Inc., the business journals, Hunt Scanlon, and fast company.
Functional, highly visible digital strategy and consulting experience.
Brands Ive Worked With...
Read how we developed a digital strategy for trane.com to solve Trane HVAC's quickly decling digital presence and organic reach through a comprehensive SEO strategy.
Trane HVAC redesigned their residential website and faced a 90% loss in organic traffic, inaccurate analytics, and poor site performance in the following months.
Define what aspects of the new site are causing the steep fall of organic traffic, and organizing these opportunities for improvement for the implementation teams. Construct a comprehensive SEO strategy that addresses on-page, off-page, and technical improvements. Set standards for net new content, new pages, file naming, and keyword research. Lastly track the success of individual efforts and report these wins to leadership on a weekly cadence.
First conduct a thorough SEO audit of the site to determine the main pain points of the site, and identify easy wins to quickly boost SEO in the short term and set long-term SEO tasks for the team to work toward to drive slow but compounding SEO growth over time. Set SEO strandards for net new content early, and find what amount of content is feasible for the content team to produce monthly, then build a content calendar to ensure post consistencty.
In the first week of my consulting work for Trane, I completed a deep dive into all aspects of the site, focusing on: On-page, Off-page, and technical SEO implementation as it currently is. The audit revealed critical technical and on-page issues causing the site to lose significant ranking power. I then organized the tasks needed to correct Trane' SEO into short-term and long-term, then prioritized the tasks by priority.
Short Term Tasks
Long Term Tasks
Solving Trane's drop in SEO and bringing the organic traffic back up from a 90% drop was the first priority. Then implementing changes to keep a consistent growth in organic traffic month over month was the next step.
The main causes for the Trane websites significant loss of organic traffic and visibility can be boiled down to these 3 main issues:
Adding canonical tags to all pages of the site relieved some of the duplicate content issues the site faced and corrected much of the inherent penalties the Trane website was facing from google. The product pages and dealer pages, which are the highest converting pages on the site, were receiving practically no organic traffic due to two main reasons: each product page and dealer page featured almost no unique content when compared to pages in the same path, and the UX of the site hiding internal links to the product pages -making it difficult for users to follow a natural progress through the site from homepage to product categories to products.
After implementing SEO standards for newly written content, I worked with the content teams to prioritize products by popularity and engage the teams to write 150+ words of net new content for each product page to alleviate the duplicate content restrictions between the pages.
With Dealer pages the process was much longer, requiring the content teams to gain approval for any net new content with the dealer themselves, which often took weeks to meet an agreement let-alone approvals. Dealer pages became a much longer term task that required Trane to engage with dealers more.
The average page load speed for the Trane site was 15 seconds, getting this number down to 2 seconds was the goal. Resolving the page load speed would lead to less bounces, higher organic traffic, and higher conversions/engagement as the site become much faster and easier to use. To resolve page speed, I preformed a deep dive into the sites code running multiple site wide tests to identify what was slowing down the site inside of the site's code. In the code of the site I found tens of unused scripts that was causing significant slow downs, and overall uncompressed images across the site. To fix site speed I started tasks on removing the unused scripts, clean up the code overall, and lead an initiative to compress and properly name all 400 images on the site.
The Trane site was missing a consistent header structure, causing google to have a hard time determining the focus of many pages across the site. Setting content standards to include 1 H1, 2 H2s, and any number of H3s was the first step. Redeveloping the content on the site to fit into this structure was a longer term task, as many pages utilized H4s and H5s alongside 4 - 7 H2s. Confining the content ot the previously mentioned structure lead to more focused pages and lead google to more easily identify the focus of the pages and articles.
After 2 months of project organization and task launches the decline in organic search was halted, resulting in the first positive month of organic traffic growth in 5 months. Form there the organic traffic of the site continued to grow, leading to a 23% increase in organic traffic in the next 2 months and the end of the consulting project.
Lead and managed the redesign of the SPX FLOW website, including writing 77 pages of net new content and developed various other digital assets, like presentations, infographics, workshops, social media campaigns, and lead generation strategies.
SPX FLOW's website had never been a strong tool fro driving leads. The site had sat stagnant since 1995, and the 28 brands owned by the manufacturing giant were all published on subdomains, leaving all of the brand pages to their own devices causing none of the site to rank well.
Design, develop, and manage the SPX FLOW website redesign. Implement SEO best practices while constructing and directing a precise lead generation strategy. Provide ROI on the project as a whole, detailing the increases in revenue and brand reach through digital channels. Redesign the SPX FLOW site into a seamless eCommerce experience. Re-strategize the incorporation of the 28 brands owned by SPX FLOW and represent each brand fairly between each other on the site. Develop content specific to branding SPX FLOW, and create the structure of the site to emphasis SPX FLOW as the owner and leader of the 28 owned brands. Lastly develop a website for SEO and secondly for user experience.
Launch the new SPX FLOW website within 5 months of the projects start. Implement clear service, product, and capability pages within the site. We decided to develop the site after creating a highly detailed skeleton that focused on SEO. The sitemap and structure of the site was designed to optimally drive organic traffic and lead those users to conversion with charming UX, UI, and design.
Redesigning the SPX FLOW website began with deciding on art direction and a efficient way to convert the content of the old sites 2000+ pages to the new design and strategy without losing any context.
A large part of redesigning the site was rebuilding it with intent, with a collective goal in mind. On this corporate website redesign project our team of SEO consultants and website designers had the ability to rebuild the website and design an effective strategy alongside it.
The design of SPX FLOW's corporate website redesign integrated SEO best practices from concise use of header structures, keyword research and implementation, the use of meta data, and consistent file naming schemas, all to help the redesigned site rank and ultimately reach a new digital market.
After redesigning and rebuilding the corporate website, the site was launched in early February 2020. Post launch, our team helped set accurate and complex analytics into the site and overall digital strategy. Setting up google analytics, custom tags and analytics to track users and their buying journey through the site. This process gave SPX FLOW exact insight into the function and effectiveness of the website relaunch.
With a new site designed for SEO our website redesign specialists also created a strategy for continually cultivating new content for the site and developing a consistently growing website. This was achieved with the implementation of capabilities and a new blog section to the site, offering additional paths to info for users, adding the a customers level of trust in the brand.
Building a corporate SEO and lead generation strategy through our SEO consulting services was the easy part, implementing the strategy and ensuring its adherence across hundreds of employees working in and around the website on a daily basis was far more difficult.
To create a level of consistency our SEO consultants designed a number of workshops and presentations to teach and provide insight for the employees working on the site. Through several workshops we covered the strategy for the multiple digital channels, from proper use of social and integrating social campaigns with net new website content, to covering how to conduct detailed keyword research and how to effectively track success through analytics.
Our SEO consultants and website redesign specialist managed several large-scale digital platform integrations for SPX FLOW as well.Our website redesign specialist developed a detailed "where to buy" tool for the company. Creating a solution for digital customers to find distributors in their area, through the use of a massive database of well over 200,000 different distributors compiled by our professionals. The new tool allowed for customers to convert directly on the site, providing a much more satisfyingly user experience. Our charlotte based SEO consultants designed presentations and detailed instructions to reach SEO best practices for SPX FLOW's platinum corporate partners, the workshops included topics on SEO, social integration, mobile web design, and expanding analytics.You can read that case here : M.G.Newell Case Study
The conclusion of the project had out SEO consultants detailing the customer journey through implementing and reading google analytics, tracking where inbound leads came from and which page they landed on, adding validity to our SEO work, and proving impressive return on investment.
Best Mattress is a large family-owned mattress manufacturer and distributor in the Columbia SC and greater Midlands region. Since 1928 the company has hand crafted quality mattresses that stand the test of time. Their online presence, and specifically their website, was a stark contrast to the quality hand-crafted approach that had made the company so successful over the years. Control Advertising was hired to change that.
A multitude of issues were plaguing Best Mattress online including their online branding, a poorly designed website lacking mobile responsiveness, low search visibility and web traffic, and the inability to sell their products online – all contributed to the fact that in 2020 Best Mattress could hardly attribute any value to their digital marketing efforts. With such a stellar reputation and incredible product, during a year that home furnishings were being sought out almost exclusively online – our agency knew there was a massive ongoing opportunity cost that Best Mattress could no longer afford to pay.
Our objective was simple – to design and build a fully custom website for Best Mattress. one that was commensurate with the hand crafted quality that the company was known for. We also sought to deliver a fully functional and search engine optimized e-commerce website that would drive traffic and revenue for the company.
Reviewing the original site we knew that we had to completely build the new website from the ground up – beginning to end. Our team began by developing a sitemap for the new site, then redeveloping the copy and information architecture for the website. Our agency then developed new wire-frames and flat designs that were later built into a website. Control Advertising also worked with the client to develop a custom video, new product images and descriptions, and for the first time ever – built a functional e-commerce website able to handle purchasing, financing, and shipping anywhere in the US.
Working closely with the team at Best Mattress, our agency developed the content necessary to build the custom eCommerce website in the most simplistic, yet high quality manner possible. The end results were a terrific marriage of simplistic minimalist design and the level of quality and professionalism that represented the brand appropriately.
During the process there were many obstacles including product images and the hurdle of building a true eCommerce website for the first time, however in the end the site was launched in a timely manner and the results were unbelievable. In the first two weeks after the website launched organic traffic increased over 1000% and the website saw more visitors than the prior 6 months! Our attention has now shifted to search marketing and online sales on the website.
Our Charlotte based eCommerce website redesign specialists developed the new Best Mattress website with easy to navigate UX and UI design, while integrating new brand-centric elements. One of the new elements added to the Best Mattress website is the opening video on the homepage. Filmed, edited, and written by Control Advertising talent, the new video adds a much more personal branded experience than any competitors are currently offering. The video gives insight into how your next mattress is being made [by hand by the way] and lets you the customer connect with the person hand stitching the seams of your new mattress. The new site also allows customers to make purchases for the site itself unlike the old Best Mattress website. The newly redesigned eCommerce pages also have their products pulled and featured in google snippets frequently due to the extensive SEO work incorporated in redesigning the website for eCommerce.
Control Advertising Agency - Aidan Eaton