Cleaning SEO: Bringing a Client’s Traffic Back from the Dead
Modern-day cleaning services and local SEO are joined at the hip, especially for the most successful companies.
Now more than ever, people use search engines like Google to find businesses in their local area, even those in their own neighborhood.
SOCi’s Consumer Behavior Index (CBI) research found that 80% of online users search for local businesses each week, and 32% do so every day.
This means whenever their homes or offices get dirty, the first place they’ll look for a cleaning service is on Google.
Therefore, if you can get your cleaning service website to rank #1 for essential local keywords (which are search terms like ‘cleaners near me’), you’ll start generating a ton of business online. More importantly, if you don’t engage in local SEO, all that business will flow to your competitors instead.
Such was the case for the focus of today’s case study.
Our client’s website, a tenured cleaning company in Connecticut, was hearing nothing but crickets for years before they contacted us to take over their local SEO.
They were sick and tired of their online presence gaining no traction, but we put an end to that!
This is the story of how we skyrocketed their organic traffic (we were able to achieve a 482% increase) through a combination of content creation and link-building.
Stay tuned to discover the secrets behind our SEO success.
The Client: A Long-Lasting Cleaning Service in Connecticut
Our client runs a legacy cleaning service started by their father back in the 1960s.
Needless to say, the business has been able to endure for decades, thanks to the hard work, diligent service, and unwavering dedication put forth by its owners.
While they were able to thrive off referrals and print ads for many years, that all began to change starting in 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic served as a ‘digital transformation wakeup call’ for many businesses that relied on traditional forms of advertising up until that point.
The majority of consumers now look online for businesses in their area, so having a robust online presence is a must for any local business in today’s age – and that means being visible on Google.
Our client knew this, which is why they started scrambling to improve their website and search rankings for crucial local keywords.
The only problem was they were completely lost, as SEO isn’t something you can just pick up and do without any training.
That’s when they began asking friends and colleagues if they knew anyone who could do their local SEO, and one of their acquaintances happened to be one of our former clients. They raved about the work we did for them, so our client reached out for a free SEO consultation.
During our initial chat, the client laid out what they hoped to achieve from a local SEO campaign, which was:
- Rank for more local keywords related to their cleaning business
- Generate more traffic to their delivery and service pages to drive conversions
Given the scope of these two goals combined with their website’s relative obscurity, we decided that a HOTH X campaign was the best course of action.
Getting set up on a HOTH X campaign
HOTH X is our managed service, where we develop a comprehensive SEO strategy from scratch.
The client doesn’t have to do ANY keyword research, content creation, or link-building, as it’s all handled by our team of experts (unless the client wants to handle one of these aspects in-house, as we’re very flexible).
We also connect each client to a dedicated campaign manager who answers their questions and provides crucial status updates.
It’s a truly hands-off experience where the client gets to focus on running their business while we improve their visibility on search engines.
The SEO Audit: Correcting Errors and Pursuing Easy Wins
Before we get started with the actual meat of a HOTH X campaign, we always conduct an SEO audit first.
What’s that?
An SEO audit is where we analyze the client’s website to find A) any errors that may impact our future efforts and B) keywords the site already ranks for on Google.
Concerning errors, there are certain technical aspects of a client’s website that must be picture-perfect for Google’s bots to be able to crawl, index, and rank their content properly.
Here are some of the main issues we look out for:
- Slow speeds for loading, responsiveness, and interactivity (Google’s Core Web Vitals test examines every site’s loading speeds before ranking them, and they favor sites that load extremely fast)
- Duplicate content, which is two web pages trying to rank for the same keyword
- Broken links
- Orphan pages (web pages with no internal links)
- Server errors
Once the site is clear of these problems, we move on to looking for easy-win opportunities, which are keywords the site already ranks for, just not in the #1 position.
If we discover that the client is already ranking for some relevant keywords in positions 4 – 30, we’ll enact some optimizations to yield a quick boost in traffic.
In the SEO world, it’s far easier to improve existing rankings than it is to start ranking from scratch.
There are lots of reasons for this, including the fact that existing content is already in Google’s index, so you don’t have to wait for its bots to discover anything new.
The Strategy: Regular Content Creation and Building Backlinks to Service Pages
The client only had a handful of easy wins, so we focused on our main strategy the most, which was to:
- Write informative blogs once a month containing crucial local keywords
- Build high-value backlinks to the client’s service and delivery pages to drive conversions
As you can see, both tactics were devised to achieve the client’s main SEO goals, which were to rank higher and generate more traffic.
The blogs we wrote were backed up by smart keyword research, where we found trending local keywords related to our client’s cleaning services.
For the link-building side of our strategy, we syndicated content (distributed existing posts to other sites), targeted link insertions, and wrote guest posts.
Thanks to these tactics, we were able to secure backlinks with extremely high domain rating (DR) scores (which refer to how powerful a link coming from that domain is, and the scale is from 1 – 100):
This link has an unthinkably high DR of 90!
The Results: 482% Boost in Traffic, Ranking for 200+ Local Keywords
Once the meat and potatoes of our strategy began to yield results, they occurred practically overnight.
Just take a look at this MASSIVE spike in traffic that effectively raised the client’s traffic from the dead:
As you can see, there are finally signs of life in what was previously the equivalent of a flatlining EKG.
They’re also ranking for over 200 keywords, 4 of which are in the top 3:
Thanks to our efforts, their organic traffic will continue to trend up in the immediate future.
Do you want to outrank your cleaning company’s competitors on Google?
HOTH X is your ticket to simple SEO success, so don’t wait to reach out for a free SEO consultation today!
