Case Study: DJM Suspension
Auto Parts Manufacturer & Online Store
Overview
DJM Suspension is a family-owned American-made auto parts manufacturer. They were created in the 1970s out of love for aftermarket auto parts and have been one of the leading manufacturers of truck and SUV suspension and lowering kits ever since.
DJM Suspension became a client at The BBS Agency when they were referred to us from another client of ours. Their webmaster had gone MIA, meaning he dropped off the face of the earth. He stopped replying to phone calls, emails, and all communications.
Visitors to the website had a hard time finding what they were looking for, the DJM Suspension website had technical issues. The DJM Suspension team was spending a ton of time answering the same questions from customers, and their site had a lot of underlying issues with older technology and bad site structure, which was hurting their search engine ranking. Throughout our time together, we’ve both put in a lot of work in order to turn their website from a source of problems into a huge success that it is today!
Before | After (slide to see the difference)
DJMSuspension.com is now secure, easy to navigate, easy to find parts on, shows tracking information to their customers making them happier, ranks better in search engines, and their team regained lost hours spent answering the same simple customer service requests. A bunch of big wins all around!
Keep reading to learn exactly how we achieved these results.
Issue #1: The Webmaster Disappeared
DJM Suspensions webmaster disappeared.
Poof! Just like that!
One day he just stopped communicating with them.
Weeks, then months went by.
He was gone… and that caused some big problems….
Webmaster ghosted them. He just disappeared one day and stopped communicating
The Problem
When DJM Suspension came to us, they told us that they had been working with a webmaster that had completely ghosted them. One day they just never heard from him again. Not only did they no longer have someone working on their website, he owned some critical items such as their domain name, because it was purchased on his account.
Their webmaster disappeared. They had no one maintaining the site. And even worse, he had purchased/owned DJM’s own domain name… which means they owned/controlled it. Without it being owned by them, he could do ANYTHING he wanted with it, including sell it to someone else.
A webmaster purchasing your domain name on his account gives him or her ownership of your domain name. In cases like this, the domains can get held hostage. At any point, the old webmaster could’ve said that he was the owner of the DJMsuspension.com domain name, and done anything with it. He could force DJM Suspension to purchase their own domain name from him at an inflated price. He could have closed all of their email accounts or given anyone else access to them. He also could’ve sold email addresses to third party websites or scammers. Or he could’ve just not paid the bill and let the website domain and hosting expire.
Because of scenarios like this, The BBS Agency insists that our clients own their company assets, from domain name, to email accounts, to software licenses.
This is why it’s also important to use a reputable agency, like The BBS Agency, to help you manage your website. A reputable agency will only ask for access to your accounts, never own them.
You should your own own domain name!
You should own your software licensing.
You should be hosted on a good website host that maintains your site for you that you can easily leave from should things not work out the way you want.
You should partner with reputable companies like BBS to make sure your website is always safe, secure, patched, and maintained.
Never trust a critical asset to just one person. Have a team at your back. When problems arise, a whole team of people at The BBS Agency are available to resolve the issue right away. Because we have a team, you are never ghosted.
The Solution
Helping DJM Suspension regain control of their domain name took weeks.
We tracked down the domain registrar (the company a website is purchased through, like GoDaddy) . We worked with them over several meetings to verify who DJM Suspension was, explain the situation, help them get ownership of their domain name and avoid a lawsuit with their previous webmaster.
The BBS Team took over webmastering and hosting of the DJM Suspension website. We now handle all technical aspects of the website, maintenance, and any webmaster duties as needed. Since we are a team, they can contact our support team from any number of our friendly support team.
Issue #2: Too Many Customer Support Inquiries
The old, outdated website was hard to navigate & difficult to find the correct auto parts on.
The DJM team spend hours every day manually helping customers find parts, and answering questions about if an order was shipped yet.
The Problem
We next turned to the overwhelming amount of simple customer inquiries their team was being bombarded with every day. Hours and hours every week were being wasted answering the same questions again… and again.
The two most common questions people were asking were:
- “How do I find…?” (people asking how to find parts for their specific vehicle)
- “Did my order ship? When can I expect it?”
The Analysis
The current website was showing it’s age. It had been built many years prior and the internet standards have changed, and so have peoples expectations for how an online store should work. It was time to redesign the websites look and feel.
The current online store and product structure was a mess. It needed to be completely reorganized into a more streamlined category structure. We needed to add the ability for people to lookup parts for their vehicle by Year, Make, and Model. The overall site navigation menus were confusing and hard to find. That would also need to be redone, with special attention to the mobile version so people could effectively and easy navigate the website on a mobile device like a smartphone or tablet.
The Solution
We focused on the websites foundation… the structure of the websites pages and online store. We completely rebuilt the product category structure from the ground up, added product filtering and much more:
- Modernized and improved overall website design & user experience
- Rebuilt the product category structure of to allow better search, easier navigation and so the parts filtering would work
- Added auto parts filtering by year, make, model and drive train
- Added Search by SKU functionality
- Added a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page to address other common questions that the DJM suspension team dealt with.
“The DJM team especially loves how the new website has allowed us to cut down on phone calls from confused customers because it is so easy to use and streamlined. The contact page has made customers asking questions very easy for them and very easy for us to respond to, so there is no need for as many phone calls.”
-Kathryn, one of the owners of DJM Suspension
After we created an improved product category structure for the store, we then trained the DJM team on how to update and recategorize every one of their products. We also added How-To training videos in their new onsite video library that we built in, so they could reference them at any time for help.
We added Auto Parts Filtering to DJM Suspension and improved overall site navigation
Customers are now able to easily find the products related to their vehicle, answers to frequently asked questions, and contact customer service if they needed to, but now often find they no longer have to.
As a result, customer service inquiries no longer take take up so much time every day, freeing up the DJM Suspension team’s time… and making the customers happier in the process!
“The new website has cut down on busy work and allowed us to focus on continuing to grow our business instead. “
-Kathryn
Issue #3: DJM Suspensions own products were not ranking in Google
DJM Suspension has been a leader in the truck and SUV lowering niche since the 1970’s, but their own website wasn’t ranking for their own products.
DJM’s own website was NOT ranking for their own products.
The Problem
DJM Suspension is an established and reputable brand since the early 1970s. They are well known in their industry so people easily find them by name if they know who they are.
While the company itself showed up in Google’s index, their products on their own website weren’t ranking at all for the product name resulting in lost website visits, visibility online, and sales.
After completing an SEO analysis of their site, we found some serious technical & site structure problems that were hurting their search engine ranking and visibility online.
The Analysis
The DJM Suspension’s products were setup incorrectly from a UX (user experience) and an SEO (search engine optimization) standpoint.
On the old site, every product’s title on the page wasn’t the actual product’s name, it was the product’s SKU number.
The actual product name was shown further down on the page. If you were not an industry insider, this made finding products very difficult. The only way to find what you were looking for was by scrolling through each individual product, or reaching out to customer service to ask for a SKU number.
This also made the website VERY difficult for Google’s bots to understand what the website was about and as a result, Google wouldn’t rank the products on their own website.
The irony is that many of DJM Suspension’s resellers own stores and product pages were ranking better for DJM’s own products because they had the actual product names in the product pages titles and DJM didn’t on the old site.
The only way to fix this issue was to rename every product (hundreds) with a new keyword rich, descriptive name.
For example:
- Old Product name on the website –> DJM2816-3
- New Product Name on the website –> 2005-2014 Toyota Tacoma 3 inch front & 3 inch rear Complete Lowering Kit
On the old site the Google bots couldn’t figure out what a DJM2816-3 was. It was equally confusing to humans trying to find products on the site.
By renaming the products with a better, more descriptive title like 2005-2014 Toyota Tacoma 3 inch front & 3 inch rear Complete Lowering Kit it helps Google to better understand that the product is a lowering kit for a Toyota Tacoma made between 2005 and 2014.
By helping identify this issue and helping DJM Suspension retitle all of the product pages, their product pages are starting to rank better and DJM Suspension is now getting an increased volume in search traffic for many, many more terms related to their parts. This will only get better as time goes on, because we made Google’s job easier.
The Solution
After making these changes, we saw improvements in quite a few areas!
We saw a steady increase in search engine traffic since the new site’s launch
- 47.62% increase in Total Impressions in Google’s search result
- 17.7% increase in Clicks from search results
- 30% increase in CTR from search results
This all stems from Google’s increased ability to crawl, index, and understand the content of the website. This not only helped DJM Suspension’s website rank higher in search results, but since they are now showing up more often, they are getting more clicks back to the website.
- Organic backlinks, referring domains, organic keywords, and organic traffic all continue to improve
The screenshot below is of the past 30 days (when we wrote this article). We launched the website in mid-October of 2021. It’s now several months later. These numbers keep going up… and up… and up every month as Google gets a better understanding of the site and search engine traffic continues to improve because the products are now SEO friendly!
Actual 30 days of SEO improvement shortly after launch of the new site
Conclusion
DJM Suspension saw major improvements in their website, higher rankings in Google, less stress for their customer service team, happier customers, and more sales after they began working with The BBS Agency.
They gained peace of mind and security in finally owning their own domain name, and knowing that their website is always safe, secure, and maintained. They also know that since we are an agency, we are not an army of one. Any member of the BBS team can help.
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