What’s better than doubling your website traffic? Doubling the number of leads generated from your website!
That’s exactly what we did for Hartford Fence Company. And in this case study I’ll show you how…
Background
We started working with Hartford Fence Company in mid July 2015. Business was actually going very well for them already, but it was primarily through referrals.
In fact, when we checked their Google ranking for relevant searches, they were ranking #1 for only one keyword – their company name!
The owner was simply too busy building the business to spend any time improving their search engine optimization (SEO). Sound familiar?
Unfortunately, the website had been neglected and when we conducted our SEO audit we found several problems that were preventing the website from ranking high in the search results.
The Problems We Found
As soon as we start working with a new client we conduct an in-depth SEO Audit to gauge the “SEO Health” of the website. In this particular case, we found a lot of issues that were preventing our client from ranking high in Google. Here are just a few of the problems we found:
- We discovered multiple websites, rather than just one, and each website had the same exact content.
- There were duplicate Google My Business profiles.
- The business name, address, and phone number (NAP) was not consistent across all business directories.
- The website was missing individual pages for the towns our client served (aka service area pages).
- The website was lacking a strong “free estimate” call to action on many pages.
- Google Analytics was not yet installed on the website. This meant we unfortunately do not have any data before we started working together.
Once we knew all the problem areas, it was clear what needed to be done to improve search engine rankings…
Here’s What We Did
First, we installed Google Analytics and set up Goals in order to track the traffic and conversions from SEO. This doesn’t directly improve SEO, but without proper tracking it’s impossible to improve your digital marketing performance.
Second, we set up 301 redirects from hartfordfences.com to the main company website, hartfordfence.com. This ensured that all of our effort was focused solely on one domain instead of spread across potentially 3 different domains.
Similarly, we merged the duplicate Google My Business profiles into just one profile. At this point we were now dealing with just one domain and one Google My Business profile, which is a big step in the right direction.
To improve local “map” rankings even further we fixed the inconsistent NAP across business directories and also created accounts on even more relevant directories. If you’re familiar with local SEO (or if you went through our Local SEO Formula training), then you know how important these citations are for your local “map” rankings.
Next, we built out individual service area pages, which you can see on this page: hartfordfence.com/service_area/. Each unique town page is yet another opportunity for our client to rank when prospective customers are searching for a fence company in those locations.
And finally, we improved the website call to action to boost conversion rates. Ranking high in Google is worthless if your website is not set up properly to convert that traffic into leads and sales. That’s why we added a big button to every page to encourage more visitors to request a free estimate.
OK, so the million dollar question is…
Was all this worth it?
The Results
I’ll let the results speak for themselves. Below is a graph of organic traffic (aka SEO Traffic), as well as the leads generated from the SEO traffic from July 2015 through June 2016.
(Note that this is a highly seasonal business and the dip in traffic and conversions between November to February is to be expected. There’s isn’t much demand for fences in the middle of the winter :)
As you can see from the graph above, our client was receiving about 250 visitors and about 15 leads per month from SEO in 2015.
Then once the season picked up again in March, we see a nice spike up to 621 visitors and 64 leads. That’s an increase of over 140% for both traffic and leads!
Again, when we started working together, Hartford Fence Company was only ranking #1 for their company name. Now, they rank #1 in the local “map” results for the following keywords:
- hartford fence company
- residential fence
- residential fence installation
- commercial fence
- fence repair
- fence repair company
- residential fences
- fence installation
- commercial fence companies
- wood fence repair
- commercial fencing
- vinyl fence repair
- fence gate repair
- commercial fence contractors
- wood fencing
- residential fencing
- fence company avon
So what’s the big takeaway from this case study?
Get Help If You Don’t Have Time
As I mentioned earlier, the owner of Hartford Fence Company was extremely busy. He was (and still is) growing a successful business and didn’t have enough time to focus on his digital marketing.
Rather than keep putting it off year after year, he took action and reached out for help. Now, rather than relying solely on referrals, he has a steady stream of prospective customers finding and contacting his business from Google.
