Case Study: SEO Campaign Boosts Lenovo's Brand Awareness, Revenues

PROBLEM: Despite being a global leader in the sale of PCs, Lenovo, a personal technology retailer, didn't have strong brand awareness, in large part because it wasn't ranking highly in organic search.

SOLUTION: Launched a global search engine optimization campaign with the help of a search marketing agency.

RESULTS: Since launching its SEO campaign in April 2012, Lenovo has realized a 40-plus percent increase in U.S. revenue from SEO year-over-year. In addition, Lenovo's SEO traffic increased year-over-year by 40 percent in the U.S., 54 percent in the U.K., 48 percent in Germany, 110 percent in India and 10 percent in Japan.

With demand for "PC plus" products (e.g., smartphones and tablets) growing by the day, Lenovo realized it had a tremendous opportunity at hand to capture market share. The problem was the brand suffered from a lack of awareness within the PC industry, with companies like Dell and HP top of mind for most consumers.

To address this problem, Lenovo invested time and resources into improving its SEO. The strategy made sense, as SEO had the highest return on investment when it came to affecting the brand — i.e., driving more awareness consideration that elicited quality traffic.

In April 2012, Lenovo launched a global SEO initiative with the help of Covario, a search marketing agency. The move signified a sea change for the technology retailer.

"Before we had a semi-strategy with limited resources and skills internally," says Donna Bedford, Lenovo's global SEO manager, in regard to the brand's previous SEO efforts. "Now we have a strategy, we know what's worked this year, we've seen how well some of our emerging countries have picked up. That's a big focus for us because we know we can get ahead of the curve in those particular countries."