Of all the websites we have created over the past ten years, possibly no one company has benefited more than CVS Cruise Victoria, whose website graded at an extremely low 9/100 when we began working on it. Unfortunately, we do not have an example to show you and even doing a search on Wayback does not show anything ever existed before we re-designed it but there was a web page…

With only a small budget available, the design was constrained to an html site and evolved only slightly visually over a three years period.

However, today the CVS Cruise Victoria website has a grading of 89/100, which means that of the millions of websites that have previously been evaluated, the algorithm we employ to measure these analytics has calculated that this site now scores higher than 89% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness.

As mentioned above and because I want to make sure I state this clearly, this is an increase from 9/100 from the date we began optimizing and working on CVS Cruise Victoria in June, 2008. An increase of almost 900% in less than three years.

Visitation to the web site has increased by 66.50% year over year and the bounce rate is down by 25.38%.

CVS Cruise Victoria did not have a Blog, and after several suggestions, we finally talked the management into creating a Free Blog on Blogspot, even though it is not as good as virtually any other option, it does work… and was implemented in a fashion that the client could update on their own. Now, when we analyze that Blog, we find that their Blog now grades globally at  37.13 which is based on a measurement of the traffic levels to the blog and the number and quality of links pointing at it.

Optimizing that content from the Blog to assist the overall ranking of the website was a key step in achieving the higher grading, by allowing the maximum exposure of the valuable content every website has – which provides the best chance possible of drawing traffic from the web and web searches. In essence, this is about maximizing your ROC – return on content.

After coaching the management at CVS Cruise Victoria over a three year period, the site managed to collect a total of 328 inbound links to the website, from an initial total of 7.

One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites link to it. The more links the better. Having links to a website from authoritative resources on the Internet helps that website rank higher in search engines since these links are an indication that your website is trustworthy and contains good content.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a standard way to easily deliver content to visitors after they’ve left your website but they’re still interested in your subject. RSS is commonly used with blogs, news feeds, and other formatted news or other sources of information, so when we included the Blog and linked it to the website, CVS gained the integration of this feature, driving MORE traffic to the website.

Alexa is an online service that measures traffic for millions of sites on the Internet in a similar way to Nielsen television show ratings. When they crawled the website in late 2010, they found that the site had increased to rank within the top 11.68 % of all websites.

When we began work on this web site, the site ranked 73.46% of all web sites, which is quite a low score – which means we increased the sites online visibility by 61%.

So, overall, although this company would not share their sales figures with us, we think it is fair to state that with the overall success of the website, that we have helped them increase sales significantly over the past three years.

What does bother me, although it is every clients right, is that the client decided they could now update it themselves and this is one of the areas I do take exception with… we try very hard to become partners with our clients but every now and then it does not work out as we hoped and this is one of those occasions.

We wish CVS Cruise Victoria Good Luck.

—

A note added on September 1, 2011. We just checked the grading of this website and it has now declined to 77/100 from a high of 89/100 and has fallen below the Top 14% of all global websites… that’s a fairly substantial fall in grading over a period of less than a year and goes to show how much maintenance is needed on a website.