INTRODUCTION
Jim's Bookkeeping, a member of the Jim's Group, one of the world's largest franchises and one of the most famous and trusted brands in Australia, provides bookkeeping services to its clients. As part of the Jim's franchise group, the franchisees within Jim's Bookkeeping have access to a diverse range of small business operations, ensuring that they are great networkers with strategic partnerships not available to small bookkeepers.


THE ISSUES
As part of their commitmentto their clients, the team at Jim's Bookkeeping identified a medium for potential clients to gain easy access to their resources and expertise: their website. This was at a time when websites were just emerging technology here in Australia. They however experienced some difficulties in getting a website that truly reflected their group and was easily found by members of the general public.

Some of the problems they encountered included the following:

• The website was not easy to use.
• The design did not reflect the brand of Jim's Bookkeeping.
• The website did not provide its members with the necessary tools to run their bookkeeping franchises.
• With the internet emerging as a very useful and effective tool for research, it was identified that the Jim's Bookkeeping website was not easily found on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.

The above issues plagued the team at Jim's Bookkeeping for a while and various attempts to resolve this proved futile until a mutual business affiliate introduced the team at Digital Dreams to John Birse, the National Divisional Franchisor of Jim's Bookkeeping.

"After trying two different Web designers we had spent considerable dollars but had actually ended up worse than when we started. A recommendation from another of our strategic partners - StrataPay put us onto Digital Dreams who they had found to be reliable and knew how to deal with secure data. Roy helped pull us out of the mess we were in and Daani helped build a vision of where we could be."

- John Birse

THE SOLUTION
After several consultations with John and his team at Jim's Bookkeeping, a proposal was drawn up by Digital Dreams to not only rectify the issues already challenging Jim's Bookkeeping, but also put into place a plan to ensure that Jim's bookkeeping provided their clients with a website that is up-to-date with the fast pacing change of technology. The marketing team at Digital Dreams researched the market and came up with a proposal that aimed at the following:

• Re-designing the look of the Jim's Bookkeeping website to give it a modern look and feel.
• Ensuring the website adequately provided information about what Jim's Bookkeeping does.
• Providing potential clients access to information on the vast network of bookkeepers who are on hand to service their needs, an advantage they have over independent bookkeepers.
• Ability to access information via a secure area of their of their website commonly shared amoung all the bookkeepers nationally.
• Ability to use search engines to generate a positive response to the Jim's Bookkeeping website.
• Optimising the web pages within the website to ensure that they are compliant and well optimised for the search engines.
• Ensuring that Jim's Bookkeeping is displayed prominently when a set of keywords are used in search engines.
• Ability to use pay-per-click advertising with Google to immediately give the website a boost of traffic.

"Digital Dreams have re-engineered our web presence to focus on the important things to us such as getting clients and selling franchises, and from last month's results they are certainly getting us results."

- John Birse

RESULTS SO FAR
The website portion of the project was completed and went live in September 2006, from which time we started to concentrate on ensuring that their keywords were working to drive traffic to their website. Some of the keywords that they decided to use include the following:

• Bookkeeping
• Bookkeeping Services
• Bookkeeping Franchise

• Jim's Bookkeeping
• Bookkeeper
• Bookkeeper Australia

• Franchise
• Book-keeping
• Book-keeping franchise

For the purpose of this case study, we will focus on Bookkeeping, as this was our priority once the website was completed. The optimisation team at Digital Dreams worked on the Jims' Bookkeeping website using the parameters set by the main search engines, Google and Yahoo, and slowly worked on gettiing the Jim's Bookkeeping website up the ranks both on the national level and worldwide. It is worth noting at this point that prior to this project commencing, The Jim's Bookkeeping website appeared as far back as page 11 on Google when the keyword "bookkeeping" was used as a search keyword. The table below shows the results as they stand today.

CONCLUSION
As is noted from the above, the Jim's Bookkeeping website is now well ranked on the major search engines using the keywords that are relevant to their industry and what they do. The process is however not complete as the various search engines remain dynamic in updating their parameters to ensure that they provide a fair service to the multitudes of websites out there on the World Wide Web. As a result of this, the team at Digital Dreams are continually monitoring and updating their optimisation to fall in line with any new parameters set out by the major search engines. This proactive approach is what sets our service apart from our competitors and ensures that our clients' websites remain on the forefront of their competitors.