Last night I had the pleasure of attending the Cambridge SEO Meetup Group. The speaker was Ryan, the CEO (I think), of Gourmet Gift Baskets.

And so I thought- thank goodness, I was wondering where my next blog post would come from. This dude’s freakin’ awesome.

The business started as a business school project (-slash-) outgrowth of his parents’ florist business. Over the last six (I think) years, they’ve grown to over $12 million in sales. Mostly through organic search. That’s incredible.

For most of the time they have been in business they have ranked number one for 71 of their 72 desirable keywords: Easter Gift Baskets, gift baskets snacks, birthday gift baskets.

So naturally- everyone wants to know how they did it.

Well, at first- a bunch of things you can’t do anymore.

Early on, they were paying bloggers to link to them. (Don’t do that!) A bit black hat, yes- but the links were fairly high quality. Useful to the consumer. Informative. The relevance of the links was so high (in reality) that Gourmet Gift Baskets was one of the last sites to get penalized by Google for this sort of behavior (more on that in a minute).

They also paid some sketchy SEO company to do… well, they didn’t really know. Stuff that would get you banned today (link farms, cross-linking subdomains, dummy sites with auto-content). It didn’t get them banned (back then), but it was expensive and didn’t really help at all.

They started creating useful, informative content- well linked articles with unbiased information. That worked really well. Ryan described it as, “pretty gray hat stuff.” The content was good, the links were unbiased (he linked to competitors where appropriate, to educational resources, and so on)- he was able to get high-trust sites to link to this content: dot-edu and dot-gov sites linked to some of his stuff. It worked great!

Trouble was, they were being a little (or completely) manipulative in the way this content was published and controlled, and how he got people to link to it.

Ryan checks his Google rank on all major keywords every morning. One day- they just disappeared. Google got wind of what they were doing, and how they were manipulating content, and they got slammed. After a few weeks in the Google confessional known as resubmission request, Gourmet Gift Baskets pulled back onto page one (near the bottom) in time for the holiday buying season.

The strategy since then has been two pronged:

• Be less evil.
• Diversify

Be less evil.
Step one was less black and gray, more solid white hat SEO stuff. Deep in the site are these fantastic educational articles about gifts, gift baskets, food, holidays. A boatload of content that a regular visitor doesn’t see (there’s no navigation to them). The only one he mentioned was Ukrainian Easter Eggs.
They produce all this fantastic deep content, which links back to their home page. They then attempt to find people to link to that content. This creates indirect links back to the homepage- a sort of SEO funnel of goodness.
Expensive, time consuming, slow.
But effective.

Diversify
At its peak, over 80% of their business was coming from organic search on Google. While lots of people would kill for results like that, any good business person will tell you that you shouldn’t be so incredibly dependent on a single source of income. What if the algorithm changes? What if they get banned or penalized? Ryan estimates they lost about $2 million of sales the holiday season they were at the bottom of page one instead of the top.

Additionally- they’re maxed out. How do you grow an online business when everyone who looks for your product finds you? They can’t think of any more keyword phrases to optimize for. They have more or less hit the wall with revenue from organic search- and they’re spending $90,000 a year to keep it that way.

So the company is starting to move backwards into traditional media, forward into Social media, and sideways into a whole new way to generate SEO goodness.

The coolest SEO strategy I’ve ever heard of
When Ryan first said, “We’re gonna break world records!” I thought he was speaking in that overly-enthusiastic sales guru hyperbole I’ve grown accustomed to in the last few years. I was wrong.

Gourmet Gift Baskets is going to bake the World’s Largest Cupcake!

How big do you think the current world’s largest cupcake is? You’d probably think in terms of a Volkswagon, right? No, sadly- the current record holder is an embarrassingly small footstool of a cupcake.
151 pounds.
Lame.

Ryan’s cupcake is going to be 7,151 pounds! Now we’re talking. Custom fabricated cupcake mold. The world’s largest electric oven. A cupcake the size of a car. This dude is serious.

With a little bit of wheeling and dealing, a bit of creativity, and a whole lot of bootstrapping, this whole thing is going to cost around $20,000. Much less than the $90,000 a year he’s been paying. And what higher quality links they’ll get. This is beyond white-hat/black-hat. This is Wizard’s Hat SEO.

To Do
You there. Entrepreneur. Internet marketer. SEO guru.

Stop trying to game the system. Gourmet Gift Baskets is a great case study in SEO trickery- what used to work, why it worked, and why it doesn’t work anymore. If you’ve been doing SEO for more than two years, you probably need to forget everything you know.

Do something different. Something ridiculous. Something at least the size of a Volkswagon.

And don’t put all your Ukrainian Easter Eggs in one Gourmet Gift Basket.