Combining business listings and social interactions, Arms Directory LLC has established itself as a central hub for the firearms and outdoor industry, facilitating greater community involvement and business reach. The platform boasts a business directory with over 72,000 businesses and focuses on building social groups.
Initially, the Arms Directory’s website resembled a single wall where members shared updates, and personal firearm experiences with external articles and relevant images. Today, it serves not just as a social platform but also as a central hub for 2A policies, firearm news, offers, historical insights, and guides.
ArmsDirectory.com in the beginning of 2023
The platform now boasts a sleek, modern design that enhances user experience with its intuitive interface. With 9,000+ members, 72,000+ businesses, and 270+ vibrant groups, Arms Directory is the go-to directory for many firearm enthusiasts.
ArmsDirectory.com in 2024
Over ongoing development and marketing initiatives, DevriX has helped the client in building a robust platform capable of managing 80,000+ pages, handling an immense amount of daily traffic from 2A enthusiasts and businesses alike.
Key Improvements to Arms Directory
Significant improvements that have been made include several key enhancements to both functionality and user experience. All of which have elevated overall performance and satisfaction. It also handles high traffic volumes and ensures data security in a landscape often hindered by legal complexities.
WordPress website optimization: is crucial to bettering performance, overall functionality, and site effectiveness. The approach involved various improvements such as:
- Backend optimization to handle more than 80,000 pages and a huge amount of traffic
- Frontend optimization to modernize the user experience
- Optimization for businesses that want to list their shops on the directory
- Focus on the social aspect of the platform allowing users to comment, discuss, and leave reviews
- Platform optimizations: listings, performance, stability, affiliates
- Clean plugin architecture
- Implementation of payment systems for secure transactions
- Page speed and on-page experience optimizations
Understanding the community’s desire for interactive features, custom plugins were crafted to boost user engagement without compromising speed.
Marketing optimization: By applying proven SEO practices and utilizing Go-To-Market strategies, Arms Directory was able to increase its traffic by 600%.
In addition to that, page indexing has ramped up and the number of impressions has surpassed 100,000 and they are going steadily up.
This has been achieved by implementing time-tested activities. Well-designed, properly written, and SEO-optimized articles played a key role in the significant increase in their organic traffic. This not only provided users and visitors with more relevant information but also encouraged them to spend more time on the platform and share it with others. The additional initiatives covered were:
- Landing page building
- Newsletter management, including email list building and weekly maintenance
- Email and LinkedIn cold outreach to targeted leads with a manual collection of relevant leads for better conversion rates
- Affiliate programs
- Content creation for the blog
- Social media management and content creation
- Data services
- HubSpot integration and management
In the next paragraphs, we’ll dive into challenges and solutions for Arms Directory’s high-performance platform capable of supporting its growing community with most of its business coming straight from organic searches.
The Technical Challenge
The core challenge for Arms Directory was its site architecture, heavily reliant on a patchwork of plugins that slowed down the site.
The goal was clear: revamp the website’s backend to improve performance and prepare for future growth without disrupting the active user community.
1. Enhancing Server Performance
To handle more traffic, we had to optimize the server setup. With the numerous firearm businesses available, directories like Arms Directory need to be able to hold a great number of pages without decreasing website performance. As part of the ongoing work on the project, we managed to build an infrastructure that supports more than 80,000 pages and thousands of page visits per day. This process involved configuring and fine-tuning the process management on our self-hosted web server and implementing New Relic for real-time monitoring, enabling us to swiftly pinpoint and address performance bottlenecks. We also adopted Redis to enhance data caching and improve retrieval speeds, and utilized content delivery networks (CDNs) like Cloudflare, along with S3 storage, to significantly reduce server response times and delivery latency.
2. Streamlining Plugins and Transitioning Technologies
By auditing the existing plugins and identifying several that were redundant or inefficient, we streamlined these tools, integrating custom solutions where necessary.
A major shift was transitioning from Elementor to Gutenberg, which not only improved load times but also provided a more flexible environment for future development.
3. Database Optimization
As part of our initial review, we analyzed the slow query log and identified several inefficient operations, some of which originated from third-party plugins and solutions, which were particularly challenging to optimize due to the limited access for modifications. We tackled these independently by reviewing and optimizing the SQL commands and database interactions ourselves, utilizing core WordPress tactics, and, when necessary, switching to fully custom overrides.
Once done, we set up regular reviews of query performance metrics to proactively catch and optimize any newly emerging slow queries. This focused approach allowed us to ensure that our platform remains efficient, even as content and user interactions grow.
4. Custom Development for User Engagement
A main goal for the Arms Directory team is to ensure a modern and customer-centric platform capable of answering the firearms community’s needs. By actively working on the community’s need for interactive features, we developed custom plugins that enhanced user engagement without compromising on speed. These tools were designed to encourage community interaction and content sharing, important to the site’s social dynamic.
5. Overhaul of Directory Functionality
After addressing several technical issues and design elements for improvement, the directory has been effectively reconstructed through a comprehensive visual overhaul. This redesign not only improved the website’s appeal but also incorporated functional features, such as enabling businesses to claim their pages within the platform. Furthermore, the integration of convenient payment solutions for both directory users and the businesses featured on it was a major win on the user experience front.
Tech Results
Arms Directory experienced a 50% improvement in site performance. Server response times were halved, and the optimized database handled queries more efficiently, leading to faster page loads even during peak traffic. The transition to Gutenberg offered the flexibility needed for ongoing adjustments and feature additions without significant downtime.
The Marketing Challenge
In the following paragraphs, you’ll cover how we helped Arms Directory scale into a high-performance platform, well-recognized today with most of its business coming straight from organic searches.
To help the Arms Directory team attract the required traffic and brand visibility to continue growing, our teams focused on 2 main aspects – SEO and Go-To-Market strategies.
SEO Work
By focusing on better-structured content and keyword strategy, optimizing and producing useful content, investing monthly efforts in link-building, and solving complicated technical SEO challenges, the results achieved today are significant and ensure stable and growing monthly organic traffic for the business even when many other high-reputation websites struggle with the latest Google updates and derancking issue.
1. SEO Optimization and Keyword Strategy
To boost the visibility of our client Arms Directory, we overhauled their keyword strategy. This included thorough competitor analysis to pinpoint high-value terms relevant to their niche.
2. Content Marketing
A comprehensive content calendar comprising a variety of useful, SEO-friendly blog posts and articles to meet the diverse requirements of our audience has been developed as part of the process.
3. Link Building and Site Authority
To enhance Arms Directory’s domain authority, we launched a focused ongoing link-building campaign. This involved acquiring top-tier backlinks from respected websites within our client’s industry.
4. Technical SEO
Some of the key initiatives covered as part of our approach to enhancing the online visibility of our client’s online directory platform, focus on:
Structured data: Structured data optimizations to improve content understanding and searchability by search engines.
Internal linking through custom widgets: Additionally, we developed custom widgets that enhanced internal linking, ensuring improvements in the indexing of business listing pages.
Custom metadata rules: To further amplify our efforts, we customized the Yoast SEO setup, enabling the automated generation of optimized metadata for over 80,000 pages. These technical enhancements not only boosted the site’s SEO efficiency but also improved the overall user experience, driving increased traffic and engagement.
Below you can see the performance of their top pages in two different time periods – from the beginning of 2024 till the end of June 2024 (left column) vs July 2023 till the end of 2023 (right column).
Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy
To effectively reach your target audience and maximize success, utilizing a comprehensive Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy is crucial in ensuring a well-planned marketing approach.
The services covered as part of the project involve:
1. Lead Gathering and Outreach
An outreach campaign included manual lead gathering and email outreach via different outreach tooling – targeting industry influencers and potential business listings. In addition, we extended our reach through LinkedIn outreach – targeting and connecting 200-300 new businesses weekly on average as part of the outreach funnel for the client.
2. Social Media Management
As part of the lead generation funnel for Arms Directory, the team has worked on content that engages and resonates with users on Facebook and Instagram. By efficiently handling these channels, the presence on Meta’s platforms allowed for additional impressions.
3. HubSpot Integration and Newsletter Management
We used HubSpot to manage the lead generation process, giving both teams organized, traceable, and efficient communication with our target audiences.
4. Performance Tracking and Adjustment
For the past year of collaborative work, we instituted monthly performance tracking to gauge the effectiveness of our marketing strategies. This data-driven approach allows us to pivot our strategies as needed, ensuring maximum impact for our client’s marketing efforts.
Results
Through shared SEO and Go-To-Market activities, the platform has witnessed a substantial rise in organic traffic. Some of the recorded numbers include:
- Website visits skyrocketed from 904 to surpassing 6,000 monthly visitors.
- Impressions surged from 60K to 405K within a month.
- Arms Directory experienced a significant boost in rankings, with more than 90 new keywords reaching the top 10 search results.
Arms Directory’s strategic marketing endeavors result from highly collaborative efforts between both teams, involving different roles and expertise from both companies – Arms Directory and DevriX, reshaped the client’s online presence, resulting in tangible boosts in traffic and engagement.
Through refined SEO strategies, enriched content marketing, and a robust link profile, Arms Directory solidified its stance in a competitive landscape, poised to captivate and involve a larger user base than ever before.
Conclusion
The technical overhaul of Arms Directory set a new standard for how dynamic community platforms can operate efficiently at scale. With a robust backend, streamlined plugin use, and improved server infrastructure, Arms Directory is now poised to grow its user base and continue as a leader in the firearms and outdoor industry space.