Low Traffic, All Branded Keywords

[MountainMedia]

I have a client that is strong locally - and the majority of the (converting) traffic that she gets is through branded keywords. Her traffic is at about ~200 visits a month. She is ranking for some non-branded keywords, but is in a highly competitive niche - gift baskets - and isn't converting for non-branded keywords.

The domain authority of the website is at 27, with the homepage authority at 39. Because she is already strong locally I don't necessarily see the need to build local citations for her.

What strategies would you suggest to help increase the traffic and conversion of her website? It isn't a new website - the domain was purchased in 2002.

I'm just at a loss here in terms of what we can do as an SEO company to help her build an audience - we have already been writing guest posts for publication for her, and she doesn't have the budget for high-cost directories that would really help her authority. We haven't really ventured into conversion rate optimization or multivariate testing - but I feel like what needs to happen right now is the boosting of her traffic overall.

What say you all?

[DRSearchEngOpt]

I don't necessarily have the answer for you but I can tell you that you ABSOLUTELY should NOT get into Site Optimization with MVT or A/B.  You want to make sure that your tests reach statistical significance and to do this you need numbers.  If her conversion rate is only 5-10% of all visitors then you can expect that only 10-20 people a month actually purchase a product.  Even if she has 50% conversion rate you are only looking 100 conversions a month.  That is fairly insubstantial ESPECIALLY when you are considering a MVT.  At a very minimum when I am testing on a clients site I need to see 150+ conversions and even then I do not feel very comfortable in making a conclusion unless the lifts are enormous enough to extremely outweigh the interval/margin or error.

Links are going to help quite a bit as well as making sure that there are no big impediments to her site ranking well, hence a site audit.  I would also strongly consider looking at some pretty interesting techniques in doing local to attract business.  Does she have a B&M store as well?  If so look at hosting a geocache.  She might look at signing up with Help A Reporter Out (HARO) and trying to find some articles she could help out with.  Try and think outside the box.  Also just revisit a lot of the basics to validate that everything is done as well as it could be.  But I highly recommend that until traffic picks up, you stay away from testing or at the very least MVT.  You need confidence to choose a winner, statistical confidence.

[SlavaRybalka]

Create link-baits on new web pages. Share/tweet/engage in Social Media. Search for ways to give her clients' additional value. Make new connections. Add her website to professional networks. Participate on gift basket forums. Participate on local forums. Announce new events there. Let her host a gift basket event. Start a YouTube channel and shoot 20 educational videos about gift baskets. Continue to create business listings. Use StumbleUpon. Check if her internal pages are optimized to A level. Cross-link the pages. Become the big fish in a small pond.