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Company name: Allsport (now "Getty Images News And Sport")

Web site: http://newsandsport.gettyimages.com/

Company Profile: Allsport (now Getty Images' News and Sport division) provides high quality sports images and photos to professional clients worldwide.  Whether it’s Major League Baseball, World Cup Soccer, PGA golf tournaments, NASCAR or CART racing events, the Olympics or any one of hundreds of sporting events around the globe, chances are that Allsport’s experienced team of award-winning photographers are on hand to capture the action.  Allsport’s clients include ad agencies, major newspapers and magazines, sports-related Web sites, book publishers, trading card companies and media buyers around the world.

Despite being one of the most visible and recognizable brands in sports photography, Allsport’s Web site was virtually invisible in the major search engines and directories on the Web.  This lack of visibility was costing Allsport business – prospective clients were searching the Web for sports photography agencies and finding only Allsport’s competitors.

“We needed more leads, and we needed to do something about our brand awareness on the Web,” says Marc Kurschner, Allsport’s Director of Sales.  “It was frustrating doing searches even on our own company name and not being able to find our site.  As we were becoming more involved in doing business on the Web, we knew we had to do something about our visibility in the search engines.  We hired Web-Search-Engines.com as they were highly recommended to us by colleagues.”

WSE worked closely with Allsport’s sales and marketing team to come up with a list of 20 targeted keywords and phrases directly related to Allsport’s business.  Within two weeks of the project’s inception, Allsport’s Web site had been tweaked and improved and new pages were added so that the Web site would become a search engine magnet.  Over the next two months, the major search engines and directories began indexing the new pages.  This had an immediate and significant impact on traffic to the Web site.  Hits to the Web site went up over 100%, but more importantly, the number of qualified leads went up as well. 

Allsport receives most of their new customer leads directly from an enquiry form on the Web site.  In December of 2000, before the project began, Allsport was receiving approximately 90 enquiries per week.  By March of 2001, this was up 70% to 150 enquiries per week and by May, it was up to nearly 200 new leads per week. 

“Traffic to our Web site started going through the roof and so did our sales!” says Marc.  “Of the leads we have been getting on the Web, about 20% turn into new customers.  Since most of our new customers become long-term clients, a single high quality lead can mean major revenue for us.  One of the customers who found us on the Web during this process has already led to $20,000 in new business.  In terms of ROI (return on investment), this project paid for itself in less than a month, and it continues to bring us more and more new customers each month.  We expect this project to pay for itself many times over in the first year alone.”

The reason for this dramatic improvement?  Higher ranking positions in the search engines and directories that people actually use.  In January of 2001, Allsport had only 1 top 20 spot for their keywords among all the different search engines and directories on the Web.  By May, they had over 200 different top 20 ranking spots, including top 10 spots for such popular phrases as “sports photography,” “sports images” and “Olympic photos” on Alta Vista, top 10 spots for “sports photos” and “sports photography” on Excite, and #1 spots for “licensed photos,” “sports stock photos,” “golf images” and “football images” on Google and Yahoo. 

“We were overjoyed with the results – our site is getting ranked over hundreds of thousands of other competing pages, now.  We are also very happy with the service provided by the folks at WSE.  They keep us informed with progress each month and they have been very helpful and responsive whenever we have had questions or requests.  We are hiring them again for an even larger project.”