Utility SEO Case Study: A 432% Increase in Organic Traffic
Heavy utility equipment providers face the dual SEO challenge of:
- Appealing to decision-makers at construction companies (B2B or business-to-business)
- Ensuring their website ranks for important local keywords (local SEO)
When you put these together, you wind up with B2B local SEO, which is a highly specific offshoot of traditional SEO.
For this reason, many heavy equipment providers struggle to maintain visibility on search engines like Google.
In many cases, it’s because they embrace one aspect (either B2B or local SEO) and not both.
For instance, let’s say you do the hard work necessary to rank in the #1 spot for localized keywords related to your heavy equipment.
However, you neglect to create enough content necessary to appeal to decision-makers at construction companies (B2B marketing is notorious for having a lengthy sales cycle requiring targeted content for each stage).
The trick is to combine B2B with local SEO, which is exactly what we did for the focus of today’s case study: a heavy utility equipment provider specializing in sweepers and scrubbers.
Thanks to our expertise in B2B local SEO, we were able to achieve a 432% increase in the client’s organic traffic in just 6 months.
How did we do it?
You’ll have to keep reading to find out!
The Client: An Experienced Utility Equipment Provider with 40 Years of Experience
Our client operates a massive utility equipment company that sells, rents, and repairs cleaning equipment and vehicles.
They have a large fleet of sweepers, scrubbers, sewer equipment, and general utility vehicles.
For the past 40+ years, they’ve been providing their customers with top-notch equipment, knowledge, and service. While the business was going well, their website was struggling to gain traction.
They weren’t averaging many visitors each month, and they were getting outranked by all their primary competitors.
While other marketing channels were still generating business, they knew they were leaving a lot on the table by not having a strong online presence.
In today’s age, a vast majority of people use search engines to find out about local businesses, and the same is true for B2B decision-makers.
Research shows that nearly 90% of consumers search for a local business on their smartphones each week. Moreover, 57% of B2B marketers agree that SEO generates more leads than any other marketing channel.
So, if your business is B2B and you don’t have an SEO strategy, you’re letting tons of leads go down the drain.
Our client knew this, which is why they scrambled to get their SEO in order.
Their first course of action?
To get in touch with our experts for a free SEO consultation, of course!
After doing some research online, they came across a few of our testimonials and case studies that sang our praises.
During the consultation, we discussed their primary goals and the best ways to achieve them. It didn’t take long for us to determine that a HOTH X campaign was the way to go.
It’s our fully managed service where we connect clients with one of our dedicated campaign managers. Unlike our standalone SEO products (which are incredibly useful in their own right), HOTH X uses a combination of all our products to provide a comprehensive SEO solution.
The Audit: Making Optimizations and Looking for Easy-Win Opportunities
Every HOTH X campaign starts the same way: with a detailed SEO audit.
This is where we analyze the website’s current performance on search engines and resolve any glaring errors.
For example, sometimes we come across indexing errors that are actually blocking the client’s content from appearing in Google’s search results.
It’s absolutely crucial for us to find and resolve issues like these before moving forward with our strategy. Otherwise, the work we do moving forward might not even matter (like if the client’s content isn’t even ranking).
In this client’s case, their website was in relatively good shape. It was professionally designed, easy to navigate, and had adequate loading speeds.
During an audit, we check for errors like:
- Broken links
- Noindex tags (these also remove web pages from search results, so we make sure they’re not out of place)
- Orphan pages (web pages containing no internal links)
- Duplicate content (two pages trying to rank for the same keywords)
Besides technical factors, we also take a close look at the website’s current content. In particular, we’re on the hunt for any keywords the site already ranks for, just not in the top 3 (positions 4 – 30).
We call these easy wins because it’s easy to improve their rankings with some simple optimization.
By doing things like including relevant keywords, beefing up thin content, and adding images – we can drastically improve a web page’s keyword rankings in a short period of time.
This is primarily because this content is already in Google’s index, meaning we don’t have to wait for Google to index the page for the optimizations to take effect.
If you weren’t aware, Google must crawl and index the internet for web pages to appear in its search results. This is a slow process since the internet is so large and Google has limited resources. Because of this, SEO can take a while to start gaining traction, but easy wins speed things up.
This particular client had lots of easy wins related to the products they sold, so we didn’t waste any time targeting them.
The Strategy: Building Backlinks to Collection Pages
The main issue we discovered when auditing the client’s site was a noticeable lack of authority.
In other words, they didn’t have enough backlinks to outrank their competitors.
On Google, backlinks are how you build trust since they count as ‘endorsements’ of your site’s quality and accuracy.
Our primary strategy was to build high-quality backlinks pointing to the client’s heavy equipment sales and rental pages.
We did so through:
- Finding relevant websites that accept guest posts
- Targeting link insertions where they made sense (like mentioning our client’s products on a site talking about heavy utility cleaning equipment)
These tactics proved enormously effective, as we were able to meet the client’s goals in a little over 6 months.
The Results: A 432% Boost in Traffic, Ranking for 1.1k Industry Keywords
The client saw a drastic increase in organic traffic after our campaign started to yield results:
As you can see, their traffic continues to rise!
Not only that, but they’re now ranking for over 1,000 relevant keywords, 42 of which are in the top 3.
Also, they consistently generate $1.3k worth of traffic to their site, which means they’re no longer leaving money on the table by not having a strong online presence.
The client’s campaign proves the need for SEO in the heavy utility equipment world.
Do you want to achieve similar results for your utility company?
With HOTH X, you’ll receive a dedicated campaign manager who will devise a winning strategy for you like the one above.
It’s a truly hands-off experience, and the results speak for themselves, so don’t wait to get in touch for a free consultation!
