I was introduced to Jack Gyr sometime around 2010-2011 through a colleague who connected us over a discussion to help with Jack’s business, BookWear.
Since then, I’ve worked with Jack and BookWear on and off, and lately, we’ve teamed up again to go all-in on BookWear’s website re-design and SEO.
Short Background on BookWear
BookWear is a novel, product-focused business that has been around for several decades. The concept is a small book-like mailer/giveaway that’s not an actual book, but a customizable, postcard-sized deliverable with a gift inside. From custom compressed t-shirts and beanies to custom pillow cases and puzzles, there are many gift options to choose.
Leveraging the element of surprise, BookWear serves many different industries and applications. Non-profits and healthcare institutions have used BookWear for promotional fundraiser giveaways and employee thank you gifts. Universities use BookWear as recruiting gifts to reach college students.
While the latter application, college student swag gifts, has been BookWear’s bread and butter, the company works with many different organizations and has an impressive track record of customer success and positive testimonials.
BookWear reached its hay day in the late 90s and early 2000s when it was hitting millions in annual sales revenue. But in recent years, BookWear has tapered off and relied much on repeat customer orders.
Well beyond retirement age, Jack is making a big push to get the most out of BookWear in 2024 and beyond, investing heavily in the company’s web presence. In doing so, he’s recruited my good friend and colleague, Bret Bowerman, and myself to revamp BookWear’s website and drive new leads with search engine marketing.
BookWear’s New Website and SEO Strategy
The new website redesign was done by Bret, which was a massive improvement from the very slow, outdated iteration that BookWear had relied on for the past several years. In addition to a faster, high-performing website, the lead generation funnel is optimized for seamless contact form submissions.
While Bret honed in on the design, I updated the content and SEO through the BookWear site. Unfortunately, the previous webmaster of the site removed a lot of valuable content and thinned out existing pages to look and feel more like landing pages. In turn, this compromised a lot of the previous SEO work and rankings we had done in the past.
Much of this initial update process focused on resurrecting legacy pages and restoring the performance we once had years ago. This focused on BookWear’s original authority as the OG college recruiting swag giveaway that many prestigious universities have leveraged in the past.
Before launching the new site, I also put together a new SEO content strategy focusing on new blog posts that we’d publish over the year. This strategy would focus on topics like “dimensional mailers,” “trade show swag,” and “conference giveaways” – new verticals that BookWear provides untapped market opportunities for the company.
Marketing Momentum Post-Launch
Having launched the new website at the end of March 2024, we’ve already seen a substantial uptick in search impressions and new keyword rankings. This early momentum is a good indicator that the new website is performing well and we can anticipate growth in the coming month.