DevriX increases traffic to the weapons catalog

Arms Directory has become a central hub for the firearms and outdoor industry, facilitating greater community engagement and business outreach. Its online platform includes a business directory with over 72,000 entries and forums for approximately 9,000 members in nearly 300 groups to post ratings and reviews, conduct discussions, share content and facilitate sales.

The Redmond, Washington-based company was an importer and manufacturer, but it found it difficult to maintain the business. Company executives learned that it was difficult to draw attention to the company given that many people and the media did not want to be associated with a defense company, even one that did business in complete publicity, according to DJ MacClean, the company’s CEO. .

So the company pivoted from manufacturing to software designed for gun enthusiasts and firearms professionals, enabling them to buy, sell and trade firearms and ammunition, MacClean says.

“We set out to develop a quite ambitious platform that was technologically robust,” he continues. “We knew it was too big of a problem to do it ourselves, so we started looking for a development team. It’s a huge, active website and very complex, so we needed a team we could trust.

Finding a technology partner to develop and operate the platform was not an easy task. Over the last few years, Arms Directory has worked with 10 different partners, but none of them have proven successful.

“It was like buying a Porsche every month and getting zero results,” MacClean says.

This immediately changed when DevriX, a European digital technology agency, entered the scene. “When we met (DevriX CEO Mario Peshev), we knew we were in the right place because we both had the same vision for the future,” adds MacClean. “They have the necessary skill set and can develop with us. They are a one-stop shop in many ways. We needed something that would get us from point A to point B in a scalable way.”

DevriX immediately went to work developing a robust platform for Arms Directory capable of managing over 80,000 pages and thousands of daily visits. The Arms Directory website managed by DevriX went live before the deal was signed in early 2023.

The website redesign not only improved its attractiveness, but also incorporated functional features such as the ability for businesses to order their pages within the platform and the integration of convenient payment solutions.

DevriX also helped Arms Directory optimize its infrastructure, including servers, plugins, and databases. Other services provided including landing page development, newsletter management, email and other marketing activities, affiliate program creation and management, content creation, social media management, data services and business system integrations.

By applying proven SEO practices and improving their go-to-market strategies, Arms Directory was able to increase traffic by 600 percent. At the same time, there was a 50 percent improvement in site performance. Server response times were cut in half and the optimized database handled queries more efficiently, leading to faster page loads, even during peak traffic.

Visits to the site skyrocketed from 904 to 6,000 monthly users. Views increased from 60,000 to 405,000 within a month, resulting in a significant increase in SEO rankings. Additionally, page indexing increased from 1,200 to 204,000, and over 200 new companies were added to the directory.

“The results were pretty impressive considering we don’t have a sales team,” says MacClean. “In the last three months alone, we recorded 10.1 million views on Google, which resulted in 88,400 clicks. Previously it was several thousand.

“We’re off to the races,” he adds. “There’s a lot of organic traffic coming.”

Paycheck

Since working with DevriX, Arms Directory has seen the following results:

• traffic increase by 600 percent;
• 50 percent improvement in site performance;
• increase in website traffic from 904 to 6,000 visits per month;
• an increase in the number of views from 60,000 to 405,000 within a month;
• 10.1 million views on Google, resulting in 88,400 clicks in the last three months;
• increase in page indexing from an average of 1,200 pages to 204,000; AND
• over 200 new companies were added to the directory.