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Berrien Metal Products, Inc.

Location
Buchanan, Michigan

Business Profile
Berrien Metal Products, Inc. began in Niles, Michigan in 1985 as a metal stamping operation, founded by Larry Barrett and financed with only a $5000 bank note. He rented space in a local business development building and bought a single punch press.

By 2000, acts of God and plenty of perseverance had led the company to multiply ten times. It needed to expand outside the walls of the development building it had now outgrown. It moved 7 miles west to the city of Buchanan where it then occupied a large 46,000 square foot facility. There it continued to expand.

The company has now processed over thirty million in metal products since 1985 and over twelve million since its move. Furthermore, it has expanded its capabilities dramatically into multiple fields of metal fabrication, serving the broader American manufacturing sector from coast to coast. It is a bank-debt free company, with a record quarter in Fall 2008.

BMP has served hundreds of companies in its history, with an outstanding track record of over 95% of its customers returning for more metal fabrication services. The company offers short run and long run metal fabrication deliveries. Quality Service Features means you get prototypes, in-house tooling, quantity discounts, and technical assistance from personnel with over forty years of metalworking experience. This translates into savings when slight production changes equals significant reductions in costs. You can take advantage of low metal prices by getting your estimate today.

Visit www.metalfabrications.com

Contest Entry

Challenge:
Berrien Metal Products, Inc. is a manufacturing company that has grown from a tiny operation with a single machine and one worker to a giant, 46,000 square ft facility with twenty employees--all in only twenty years. At the beginning, it was a metal stamping company. Naturally, our website was metalstamp.com.  But as our company grew quickly from metal stamping to general metal fabricating, our popular website's domain completely mislead and confused visitors concerning our capabilities. We had to switch domain names to be taken seriously by users and search engines--all without losing search engine rankings.

Solution:
Our solution to domain migration had to be perfect, so we searched for an option that was simple, easy for the user, and of course search engine friendly.   The first step was to select a domain that was highly competitive, included some of our industry's competitive keywords, and was not too cumbersome for someone typing it in as an URL. We used our Google Adwords account to find competitive keywords for our industry using the Keyword Tool. 

Then we checked for the availability of domains that had those keywords in them. One domain in fifty competitive domains was available, but it was a whopping $2,600. Our webmaster searched several websites until he was able to contact the actual owners of the domain http://www.metalfabrications.com. He offered them $1,300 cash on the spot--half the posted price. They accepted.  Then we had to get both users and search engine bots to see that our new domain had the same credibility and worthiness for ranking as did our old one. We allocated plenty of time for our webmaster to research the issue, being careful not to leave any details out. After significant digging, he discovered that the "301 Redirect" option, involving server-side coding, was the fastest and the most search-engine friendly.  

Within three weeks, our website ranked #5 for a competitive search term since the search engines accepted our coding. We were ranked with our direct competitors. Furthermore, now our customers understood our capabilities without the old and confusing domain name.

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