Heritage Parts is North America’s leading distributor of 100% genuine OEM commercial kitchen parts.
Originally founded in 1987, the company has a very successful track record selling parts over the phone. In 2014, after being acquired by a venture capital company, Heritage Parts saw opportunity to better serve their customers by launching an ecommerce website, HeritageParts.com.
The site was to be omni-channel, combining online resources that customers can access with highly personalized customer care. The new ecommerce site also provided readily available resources for Heritage’s own customer service team to better serve its customers. Finally, ecommerce created an opportunity to reach new customers through both search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM).
Prior to the new site launch, Heritage Parts approached Metamend to assist with:
SEO setup and on-going optimization
Paid search campaigns setup and on-going maintenance
On-going conversion optimization
“Our partnership with Metamend allowed us to launch HeritageParts.com with a strong search presence on the web. They’ve continued to offer valuable consultation to improve organic search rankings and the user experience of our website. They’ve also managed our pay per click marketing in a way that has allowed us to increase marketing spend 10 fold while maintaining a high ROI.”
The Process
As an already successful seller of commercial kitchen OEM parts, it was essential that the new ecommerce platform was launched seamlessly; with an optimized website ready to serve as a tool for its customers and maximize earning potential. To achieve this, Metamend focused on the following:
Search Engine Optimization
The Heritage Parts ecommerce platform handles close to two million parts, manuals and manufacturer pages. A website this big can be a nightmare to handle from an SEO perspective. Ensuring that all content is crawlable and has sufficient unique content is a major challenge. Metamend has helped Heritage Parts move from an offline business to a full online presence that drives millions of dollars of organic search revenue every month while still growing rapidly.
Metamend has spearheaded or helped with projects that have improved: indexing of content, internal linking structure, mobile rankings, search function, URL structure, inbound links, sitemaps, user experience, conversion rates, international rankings and content creation with a whole ton of great projects on the way that are sure to drive organic search traffic and conversions.
Paid Search Setup
In addition to organic search traffic a significant amount of highly targeted traffic can also come from paid search – the ads that the search engines show along with organic search results. As this was new for Heritage Parts, Metamend worked closely with Heritage Parts to fully understand their business and then to setup appropriate paid search campaigns – keywords, ad copy, ad extensions, etc.
Conversion Optimization
Getting as many visitors as possible to take action on any website is important – but especially so on an ecommerce site. From the launch of the site it was essential that it offered a streamlined purchasing process to maximize conversions. To get as many visitors as possible to buy online, Metamend spent considerable time understanding how customers actually buy commercial kitchen parts and then ensuring that the website provided the experience customer’s needed. With a focus on category, product, shopping cart and checkout pages, Metamend ensured that each page made buying a part from Heritage easy and fast.
The Result
Excellent Increase in Revenue
With the website launching in 2014 Heritage went from no ecommerce presence to several million dollars coming through the channel within the first year. They’ve converted thousands of customers to become self-serving users and continue to add thousands of new customers through organic and paid search. Year-on-year growth is still exceeding 60% with no site of growth slowing moving into 2018.
Highly Successful Organic Search Campaign
The initial SEO efforts ensured that the site launched with over 25% of traffic coming from organic search and this has now strengthened to almost 50%. During this time, revenue from organic search has grown by 1,800% and is the largest contributor of revenue of all their digital channels.
Very Strong Paid Search Traffic
Paid search via AdWords and Bing was one of the first strategies that Metamend implemented for Heritage Parts and, right from the start gave an excellent return on investment (ROI). The accounts have grown significantly since their inception and paid search revenue has increased by over 1,000% during the last 3 years while always maintaining a very strong ROI.
Excellent Conversion Rate
When the site first launched the site converted acceptably, but observation over time has allow Metamend to consult Heritage on how to improve user experience and capture more data to improve conversion rate. While conversion optimization is an on-going process, the overall site conversion has increased by over 80% since it was first launched.