Three Months of High-Octane SEO Boost Sales 48 Percent for Corvette Mods

Founded in 2007, Corvette Mods is an online retail store dedicated to selling interior, exterior and performance modifications for Chevrolet’s popular Corvette sports car. Based in Fort Worth, TX, the company features more than 1,100 different Corvette-related modification products.

Racing from the Auction House to Their Own Storefront

In 2007, Corvette enthusiast Neal Balog started selling modifications and related products for the popular Chevy sports car through eBay. Created in-house by Neal himself, around 25 products were listed on eBay. As the list of stock grew bigger, he decided to start promoting his goods through advertising channels on a Corvette forum. “After we started getting the word out, the business grew,” Neal explains. “It was clear that we needed to expand from eBay and create our own site.” Because his experience with the popular online auction site had been positive, Neal chose ProStores, eBay’s proprietary online retail solution. With the software, he was able to create a very simple, homemade website. Over the next three years, Corvette Mods continued to show steady growth. When the demand became too high for Neal to continue creating everything in-house, he expanded the business to include products from other Corvette manufacturers. By the time he decided to move to a more feature-rich shopping cart software, Corvette Mods featured close to 1,500 different products on its site. “It would be a big undertaking transferring all of those products to a new store, but our time with ProStores had run its course,” Neal says. “Moving that kind of volume was a huge boost of business for us, but we knew we could do better without the transaction fees we incurred through ProStores.” After hiring a contractor to do the new eCommerce store design, Neal set out in November 2011 to find the right ecommerce software to fit the needs of Corvette Mods. That same month, he came across Shift4Shop, a comprehensive shopping cart suite.

Green-Lighting a New Storefront Experience

Corvette Mods started the ignition on its new Shift4Shop store in December. “With Shift4Shop, we no longer had to pay transaction fees—a big part of why we outgrew ProStores,” Neal explains. “For a small business like mine, Shift4Shop has reasonably priced bandwidth packages with no restraints.” More advanced functionality has already provided Corvette Mods with a sharper online retail edge, through features like:

Gift Cards & Store Credit

Corvette Mods customers can now buy gift cards—a feature that has proven very popular, according to Neal. “The other nice thing about the system is it helps us manage returns more efficiently. We can offer store credit instead of a refund, and return customers take advantage of that.”

Social Media Integration

Shift4Shop’s
Facebook store
setup has helped simplify how Corvette Mods connects social marketing and sales. Through the integration, the company can speak with its community while offering customers the ability to add items to their cart directly from Facebook.

Simplicity of Use

On the backend, Neal says that Shift4Shop makes updating, editing and adding items to the website easy. For customers, Corvette Mods uses Shift4Shop’s strong categorization and search functionality to simplify product discovery. “The features were great—but for me, it comes to the full business experience,” Neal remarks. “Even with a large customer community, Shift4Shop still manages to present a ‘small company’ feel. You can work one-on-one with knowledgeable people and get a very personal experience.”

Upping the RPMs with SEO

With the switch to Shift4Shop, Neal wanted to make update his search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. “Corvette Mods’ search presence was always okay, but I’d never done any actual work as far as SEO was concerned,” Neal says.A part of the company’s new suite of ecommerce marketing services, Shift4Shop’s new SEO program strives to increase search rankings by focusing on website and content quality.Consistent with other Shift4Shop features and services, the program doesn’t outsource foreign labor and strictly enforces only ethical marketing strategies. When his Shift4Shop representative mentioned the company’s new in-house SEO services, Neal jumped at the chance. “Every SEO specialist or firm I contacted charged upwards of a grand. Shift4Shop came in at half-price or less in comparison.” In addition to affordability, Neal likes the ecommerce SEO service through Shift4Shop because it doesn’t require further third-party access to the site. In-house SEO specialists control the program closely. In just three months, Corvette Mods posted:  >> 48% increase in sales >> 22% increase in store visitors >> 23% increase in page views The store has also achieved and maintains ‘top ten’ rankings in ten different keywords. Neal also cites visibility as a huge advantage. “With some SEO firms, you don’t always know what you’re getting. Working closely with my representative, Shift4Shop shows me exactly what work they’re performing in relation to my website. I can see what kind of effects the program has on my site.”

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