Case Study: PartCatalog Auto Parts & Accessories

About PartCatalog Car Parts and Accessories

Operating out of Austin, TX, PartCatalog sells and ships car parts and accessories to customers, taking the hassle out of car part shopping. PartCatalog offers top-quality brands and parts to customers, and has a ship-time record that can’t be beat. Wired first paired up with PartCatalog in 2014 to work on increasing brand visibility and site traffic.

The Challenge:

Help a brand new company grow organic traffic in the competitive auto industry.

Turns out car parts and accessories aren’t the most glamorous products to sell. They’re also sold through many car shops and online retailers, so we needed a way to overcome monotony and competition in the auto industry. Starting from scratch with a new company and brand new website, we were tasked with helping PartCatalog get a piece of the market share. We knew that it would be difficult for PartCatalog to rank for high-volume search terms at first, so we had to think of alternate ways to bring traffic to the site.

The Strategy:

Gain traffic for long-tail search terms that weren’t too competitive for a new company.

We focused maximum effort on long-tail searches in specific product lines, complimenting those lines with on-page SEO, content surrounding that product line, and relevant links surrounding that product line. We kept pushing for traffic that we thought was attainable until the site got enough recognition, link authority, and brand visibility to start fighting for search real estate that was more competitive. As well as all the typical On-Page/On-Site basic optimizations, we used the following tactics to achieve this:

• Minimizing Site Indexation to Only Quality Pages

• Creating a Relevant, Strong, and Diverse Backlink Portfolio

• Constantly Monitoring and Improving Technical SEO

• Ensuring Maximum Social Media Growth

• Click Through Rate Optimization

• Keyword Research and Competitive Analysis

• Optimizing Site Architecture 

• Page Load Speed Optimization

• Content Marketing – Research, Strategy, Monitoring, Prioritizing

This last element – Content Marketing – was key to garnering brand recognition. After much research in the auto field, we found that off-roading was the perfect niche that was relevant, interested, and had content worth creating. We made PartCatalog the creator of a yearly “Top Off Road Trails” guide. Soon, we built authority and made PartCatalog’s guide one of the most relevant lists of nationwide off-road destinations.

The Results:

Quite a buzz around PartCatalog.

By year three, we had increased engagement with the content marketing campaign to 15x what we started with in year one of our work. The content we created was not only well-received, but earned PartCatalog over two thousand social shares as well as quality backlinks. The success also reflected in PartCatalog’s site traffic, increasing 132 times over in less that a three year period.