DevriX Boosts Traffic for Arms Directory

Arms Directory has established itself as a central hub for the firearms and outdoor industry, facilitating greater community involvement and business reach. Its online platform boasts a business directory with more than 72,000 listings, and forums for its roughly 9,000 members in close to 300 groups to post ratings and reviews, hold discussions, share content, and facilitate sales.

The company, which is based in Redmond, Wash., had been an importer and manufacturer, but found that line of business difficult to sustain. Company executives learned that it was difficult to draw attention to the business, given that many people and media outlets don’t want to be associated with an arms company, even one that was doing business fully above board, according to D.J. MacClean, the company’s CEO.

So the company switched from manufacturing to software focused on gun enthusiasts and firearm professionals, enabling them to buy, sell, and trade firearms and ammunition, MacClean says.

“We decided to develop a pretty ambitious platform that would be technologically sound,” he continues. “We knew this was too big to do ourselves, so we started looking for a development team. This is a giant, active website, and it’s very complex, so we needed a team that we could trust.”

Finding a technology partner to develop and operate the platform was no easy task. Over the past several years, Arms Directory worked with 10 different partners, none of which worked out.

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

That changed immediately when DevriX, a European digital tech agency, entered the picture. “The second we met [DevriX CEO Mario Peshev], we knew we were in the right spot because we both had the same sort of vision for the future,” MacClean adds. “They have the necessary skill set and can scale with us. They’re a one-stop shop in many respects. We needed something that would get us from point A to point B in the scalable fashion.”

DevriX immediately went to work to develop for Arms Directory a robust platform capable of managing more than 80,000 pages and thousands of page visits per day. The Arms Directory site managed by DevriX went live even before the contract was signed in early 2023.

The site redesign not only improved the website’s appeal but also incorporated functional features, such as the ability for businesses to claim their pages within the platform and the integration of convenient payment solutions.

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

By applying proven SEO practices and go-to-market strategy improvements, Arms Directory was able to increase its traffic by 600 percent. At the same time, it experienced 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.

Website visits skyrocketed from 904 to 6,000 monthly visitors. Impressions surged from 60,000 to 405,000 within a month, and there was a significant boost in SEO rankings. Additionally, page indexing rose from 1,200 to 204,000 and more than 200 new businesses have been added to the directory.

“The results have been pretty impressive considering we have no sales team,” MacClean says. “In the last three months alone, we’ve had 10.1 million Google impressions, resulting in 88,400 clicks. Before that, it was in the low thousands.

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

The Payoff

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

• a 600 percent increase in traffic;
• a 50 percent improvement in site performance;
• an increase in website traffic from 904 to 6,000 monthly visitors;
• a surge in impressions from 60,000 to 405,000 within a month;
• 10.1 million Google impressions, resulting in 88,400 clicks, in the past three months;
• an increase in page indexing from an average of 1,200 pages to 204,000; and
• more than 200 new businesses added to the directory.