They say on average that someone will tell three people about a good customer service experience while sharing a bad run-in with over a dozen people. As the Director of Online Sales and Marketing for allCanes.com, I know I want our customers to share their positive allCanes experiences with University of Miami fans and alumni nationwide, so to not personally do the same regarding our experience with RankPay would be hypocritical.
allCanes is a mom-and-pop shop in Coral Gables, Florida – a stone’s throw from UM’s campus. We’ve been in business since 1959, have had the same owners since 1974 and the same general manager since 1991. When people talk about “The U”, they know it’s a small, private school within a big city, with a prominent, close-knit football program that considers itself family. allCanes has been a part of that U Family for decades now and went from a little brick and mortar shop to the online world around the new millennium.
For us, the Internet was a much simpler place back around 2000. Hurricanes football was on top of the college football world – in the midst of building a 34-game win streak, reaching four straight BCS games, back-to-back title games and earning a national championship in 2001. There weren’t many online retailers competing for our business and when your program is winning, there’s enough for everybody to get theirs.
Fast forward half a decade or so and the landscape completely changed. Our beloved Hurricanes hit a down cycle and making matters worse, there were more players in the game, competing for our precious business. Larger companies with deeper pockets saw there was money to be made in selling licensed NCAA apparel and because they sold merchandise for hundreds of universities, their sites were part of a bigger network, meaning their page rank was higher and they were automatically jumping us in the search engines, poaching our customers and taking away our business.
As the manager of all things online sales for our shop, it was time to get aggressive and to figure out how to make more of a splash online, though I knew I was well in over my head. I went through the steps of learning about pay-per-click campaigns, which made sense on one level, but deep down I knew that wasn’t enough, It seemed to be a legal way of cutting the line and I also knew that when I was personally shopping online, that I ignored any paid ad as I simply didn’t trust it. I trusted Google, Yahoo! or whoever the other big name search engines told me was legit. I didn’t trust anybody who was simply buying ad space and pushing product.
It was around this time I started sitting down with large search engine optimization firms and looking for a way to organically rank higher for Miami Hurricanes-related apparel terms. It was also around this time that I got as discouraged as ever in my profession as I was being met with five-figure proposals, color graphs, charts, algorithm talk and a full fledged dog and pony show as fast talking twentysomethings were trying to lure me in and win my business.
To go from that to the simplicity of RankPay … I cannot put into words what this has done for our business, our brand and our sales. allCanes – a little mom and pop shop is now ranking with the big boys for a slew of Hurricanes-related terms. Type in a term like “miami hurricanes jersey” – which is a big ticket item for us – and we’re number two on the first page of Google, underneath the heaviest of heavy hitters. Type in a highly-searched term like “Miami Hurricanes” and RankPay has us first page placement on Google for a term completely in line with who we are and what we do.
For “Miami Hurricanes Apparel” we’re number two on page one of a Google search and for “Miami Hurricanes Merchandise” we’re number one with a bullet. RankPay helped level the playing field, allowing the little guy as loud of a voice as the bigger corporations looking to push us out. Because of that, long-time Hurricanes fans nationwide are just now hearing about this fifty-plus year old institution.
On our end, allCanes still has to work tirelessly to provide the best customer service experience and to stock the latest and greatest University of Miami apparel nationwide – and we do – but it’d all be a moot point if we didn’t have the online audience to interact with.
Not only did RankPay provide tangible results, it also gave us a simple, step-by-step, turnkey alternative that is fairly-priced, easy to use and most important, one that backed up it’s promise of getting us rankings. Well done, RankPay. We’re sold.