About the Brand
At only 3 years old, Premium Parking is a relatively new parking company in New Orleans. They own and maintain parking lots and garages in New Orleans’ CBD (Central Business District) for large office buildings. These are located near the Superdome and New Orleans Arena as well as the museum district near the WWII, Ogden, Contemporary Art Center (CAC), Confederate, and the New Orleans Children’s Museums.

The Opportunity
Premium Parking’s website code was cumbersome to update and difficult for search engines to crawl (pull info from). Nearly all the text on the website was rendered using images, making it impossible for search engines to read. Many of the links on the site did not work and the parking venues were hard to visualize without maps. The original website designer and developer had left Premium Parking with a semi-functional website and no means to update it. Also, the major search engines (like Google and Yahoo) did not have the website listed in their directories, so Premium Parking’s website never appeared when potential customers searched for “New Orleans Parking” or even “Premium Parking New Orleans, LA.”

The Challenge
Management at Premium Parking had three main objectives for Design the Planet: the ability to update their website; to appear in search engines for specific keywords; and a way to visually show where parking areas were located across the city.

Design the Planet’s Solution
Design the Planet re-coded the website using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to make updating easier for Premium Parking. Functional tools were added to the site to better organize and display the company’s facilities. The website was optimized and coded for search engine friendliness, and listed the site with Google, Yahoo, MSN and their respective directories. Finally, a link was added from the Design the Planet website to build credibility for the search engines.

Search engines cannot list a website if they do not know it exists, much like how you cannot receive mail if the post office does not have your address. Although we did not redesign the look-and-feel of the website, Design the Planet significantly improved the website’s functionality by creating maps marking each parking area’s location. Along with listing the facilities in geographic groups, Design the Planet redeveloped the homepage for easier facilitation of promotions and cross-selling navigation.

Once the website was re-coded and updated, the Design the Planet team set up a simple Content Management System (CMS) and trained the Premium Parking team on how to update their website. Premium Parking can now add and edit content and images, post current promotions, and even add new pages. Also, unlike their previous designer, Design the Planet remains available for structural/architectural changes to the interactive map of locations and to create new email forms.

The Results
Premium Parking has been updating and maintaining their website for over a year by adding promotions for Mardi Gras RV parking, discounted overnight parking for hotels and parking for the N. O. Saints football season.

When Design the Planet first started this project, we could not find Premium Parking by Googling phrases like “Premium Parking New Orleans” much less their website address “www.premiumparkingservice.com”. Within the first month of the project, their website started appearing on the third and fourth page of organic results for the search phrases “parking in New Orleans” and “New Orleans parking” respectively.

In two months, the website hit #3 for the key phrases “New Orleans Parking Contract” and “New Orleans Monthly Parking.” By the third month, their website was in the top 5 for “New Orleans Parking” and number 1 on Google for “New Orleans Parking Contract.”

A year later, with no other web marketing besides the CSS re-coding and the client’s own updates, their website remains in the top 5 for both key phrases (mentioned above) as well as the top 10 for “Parking in Downtown New Orleans” and #12 for “Parking in French Quarter.” None of these results include paid advertising or the local search in Google, which Premium Parking generally ranks first or second. This is a vast improvement to online accessibility from a year ago when they could not be found through search engines at all.

First Month
after recoding
Dec. 2008
Second Month
after recoding
Jan. 2009
Fourth Month
after recoding
Mar. 2009
Over a year
after recoding
Dec. 2009
Unique Visitor’s
182
571
1337
985
Google Ranking
3rd-4th pg.
#3 on first pg.
top 5 & top 2
top 7or 12