SEO Spices Salt Seller’s Sales

Mark Zoske has used search engine optimization to turn a passion for salt into a $3.5 million-a-year online business catering not only to consumers, small stores and major grocery chains but also to the spa crowd and even people suffering from psoriasis.

Over the past year or so, Saltworks has boosted its sales by 230%, cut marketing costs by $10,000 per month and boosted its rankings on major search engines by cleaning up its online marketing efforts.

It all started back in 2001 when Zoske, who then ran HO Sports, a company that sold skiing and other equipment, decided it was time to make the break and see if he could make money at what had hitherto been a hobby.

"I wanted to make the ultimate salt destination," says Zoske.

So he set up the company Saltworks in Redmond, WA (http://www.seasalts.com and http://www.saltworks.us), which now pulls in roughly $300,000 per month from customers ranging from gourmet cooks and people looking to use it for bathing and therapeutic applications, to small and large retailers.

At present, the firm, which has fewer than 10 employees, has about 15,000 active customers, 50% of whom buy less than $100 at a time. Forty percent are small businesses such as health food stores and food co-operatives, which buy between $100 and $1,000 per pop, and 10% are distributors and grocery chains, which order around $100,000 worth of salt at a time.

At first, Salt works had engaged a search engine marketing firm but soon found that strategy cost too much and didn't bring in enough business, says Zoske. Next, Saltworks tried to do its own search engine optimization.

Early last year, Saltworks hired Portent Interactive, which helped the firm cut its pay-per-click advertising costs by 50% --a $10,000 per month savings – and significantly improve its search engine rankings.

This helped lead to Saltworks' overall sales surge of 230% and moved the firm's search engine status from unranked to number four for the phrase 'bath salts', and to the top three for 'dead sea salt,' says Ian Lurie, president of Portent. For the phrase "gourmet salts," Saltworks went from number five to number one and for the phrase "wholesale bath salt," the company went from unranked to number four.

Portent achieved this by finding words and phrases that potential customers most frequently use to search for gourmet and bath salt products. Portent also recommended that Saltworks change its site code and structure as well as rework its site content, including its online opt-in newsletter.

"Portent echoed everything I had read about before," says Zosky, who now notes that "every time the newsletter goes out, we have a spike in sales."

For the moment, Zoske says he wants to continue doing what he's doing with Saltworks, even though he thinks the company could probably grow as much as five times its current size.

"People keep asking me, ‘When are you going to get into pepper and other spices?’” he quips.