Plumbing SEO Case Study: How Backlinks Pave the Way to Success
Here’s something every plumbing and drain service company should know by now:
Local SEO (especially on Google) is the modern equivalent of the Yellow Pages in the phonebook.
In the past, it was a crucial step for local businesses to claim a listing in the Yellow Pages to advertise their services to patrons in the areas they served.
Creating a Google Business Profile (GBP) is how you achieve the same thing in today’s age.
Doing so will make your business appear on Google Maps, and you’ll qualify for the local pack (a special series of search results appearing at the top of the page):
As you can see, appearing in the local pack highlights your business front and center on the search results, and includes:
- Your business name and address
- An average rating out of five stars
- If you’re currently open or closed (and when you open)
- Your years of experience
- A quote from one of your reviews
If you include it in your structured data, you can also include a link to schedule an appointment straight from Google’s search results (two of the businesses above have this feature active).
When you combine that with the fact that 96% of consumers find out about local businesses using search engines, it becomes clear that local SEO is essential for any plumbing service.
In this case study, we’ll tell the story of how we drastically improved a drain service company’s organic traffic through content creation and link-building.
As a result of our efforts, the client saw an 11% increase in organic traffic and began ranking for 100+ local keywords. Stay tuned to learn more!
The Client: A New Drain Service Company from New York
The client had recently launched a drain and sewer service company in New York and was trying to gain online visibility for their website.
This had proved challenging since:
- Their domain was new. Google views newer domains as potentially untrustworthy, so they have to prove their credibility in order to start ranking well.
- The client’s website lacked authority since it had virtually no backlinks pointing at their most important pages.
These are challenges that virtually every new company faces, especially if they purchase a brand-new domain.
In spite of this, the client provided exemplary 24/7 service to clients at reasonable rates, so they were able to drum up quite a bit of business on their own.
Still, they knew they were leaving a ton of money on the table by not ranking well for crucial local keywords.
As a quick background, keywords are the search terms that users enter into Google to find information.
For example, ‘best drain cleaners NY’ is a keyword (even though it’s more than one word). It’s also a keyword that’s directly relevant to our client’s business. Moreover, it’s a localized keyword since it contains a state (NY).
Whenever a user searches for a keyword like that on Google, they tend to only click on the first 3 results, with the top-ranked position hogging the majority of the clicks.
As proof, research shows that position #1 has the highest click-through rate (CTR) by far at 27.6% (position 2 is down to 15.8%).
Therefore, ranking in the #1 spot for keywords related to your business will generate a ton of traffic to your website, making you the envy of all your competitors.
This is why our client knew they needed help with their SEO, and they needed it badly.
After doing some searching online to find the best SEO agency, they came across a few of our case studies and decided to reach out for a consultation.
During the initial call, it didn’t take long for us to realize that this client needed some extensive work done, so we decided a HOTH X campaign was best.
Getting set up on HOTH X
HOTH X is our managed SEO service that provides a genuine hands-off experience for clients. We assign them a dedicated campaign manager who puts together a detailed SEO strategy designed to meet all their goals (and then some).
Also, HOTH X features a combination of all our SEO products.
For this client, our primary goals were to build their authority and rank for more keywords, so the two services we used were:
- Content creation
- Link-building
Before we got started, though, we had an SEO audit to conduct.
The SEO Audit: Fixing Errors and Looking for Quick Wins
We always begin every HOTH X campaign by auditing the client’s website. In particular, we analyze their performance on search engines like Google.
First, we clear the site of any major technical errors like slow loading speed, duplicate content, broken links, and orphan pages (web pages that have no internal links).
Once that’s done, we see if there are any easy-win keywords, which are relevant keywords the site already ranks for, just not at the top of page one. Any keyword ranking from positions 4 – 30 qualifies as an easy win for us.
We call them ‘easy wins’ because, with some simple optimizations, we can increase their rankings in a short period of time.
In this client’s situation, we only found a few easy-win keywords to target. This wasn’t surprising due to how new the domain was.
The Strategy: Regular Blogs and Building Backlinks to Service Pages
We knew that for the site to rank for more keywords, it needed lots of content, so we got to blogging.
The blogs we produced contained:
- Helpful, factually accurate information for the client’s target audience
- High-resolution images and subheadings to break up the text
- Call-to-actions (CTAs) at the end of each post to boost conversions
Also, every topic we produced was backed up by solid keyword research.
We also built backlinks for the client’s main service pages to boost their rankings.
Here’s a preview of a few of the high-DR (domain rating) backlinks we built for the client:
DR is a score ranging from 1 – 100 that represents the likelihood of a domain ranking well on search engines. As you can see, these two backlinks boast high DR scores, meaning they provide the client’s service pages with lots of ranking power.
The Results: Major Wins in Traffic, Keywords, and Authority
It didn’t take long for our efforts to begin to bear fruit, and the client’s website began to consistently generate traffic.
Before they started on HOTH X, they were hovering in total obscurity, only generating a few organic visitors each month (if even that).
Here’s what their organic traffic looks like now:
Their traffic and referring domains have been on a steady rise for the past 6 months due to our efforts.
They’re also ranking for over 100 local keywords, which is driving lots of traffic to their core service pages.
Do you want to see more traffic, leads, and sales for your plumbing service?
With HOTH X, we’ll take the entire SEO process off your hands. All you have to do is sit back and watch the traffic roll in, so don’t wait to reach out for a consultation!
