Matt Oleksiak’s career has been a road filled with twists and turns. His first stop after college was the US Army, where he spent nearly a decade in military intelligence. From there, he served as a director of sales operations for a number of companies before striking out on his own as an independent automobile appraiser, Perry-Payne Appraisal. Matt drew on a lifelong passion for cars to serve owners and buyers of antique, classic, special-interest, and everyday vehicles. The business brings together several of his key strengths: detailed observation skills, general automotive knowledge, and formal training. Matt is uniquely able to translate this aptitude into fact-based, cogent communication to benefit his customers.
A mutual friend referred him to Strategic Insights and another long-distance relationship took off. A significant number of our projects are for clients we’ve never met in person, but in this virtual age, it’s become business as usual. Matt laid out his objectives and aesthetic preferences and we responded with designs that reflected the upscale nature of the business. While Matt doesn’t deal exclusively in high-value antique cars, he wanted the website to project both expertise and luxury–appealing to clients who had money to spend.
Coincidentally, vintage autos is a not-so-secret passion of our creative team, so this project inspired passion on both the client and “vendor” sides. We enjoyed searching for car photos and traded suggestions back and forth with Matt before settling on the collection of cars now represented on the site.
The car appraisal industry is an established one, populated by an old guard of legacy appraisers. For Perry-Payne Appraisal to break through and earn the trust of prospective customers, we recommended featuring his extensive credentials as well as a Frequently Asked Questions section, where site visitors could have their own curiosity satisfied before reaching out. The language in the FAQ section was purposefully tailored to include as many keywords and phrases as possible, to boost Perry-Payne’s chances of appearing in general web searches for “car appraisal.” Our approach to SEO is highly organic and yields more dividends over time. It’s much lower-maintenance, more cost-efficient and consistent than monitoring search engine results day after day and tweaking a paid search campaign (although of course, there’s a time and place for those as well).
Matt is extremely happy with his website, especially since we ensured his service was positioned as location-independent. Matt recently moved from Virginia to Ohio, but since he’s able to do much of his work through phone calls and detailed photos, his business continued tooling along without so much as a speed bump.
