Local SEO Case Study
Sewerheroes – A Drain & Sewer Cleaning Business
Sewerheroes needed to start showing up in Google Search so they could find more customers…
Sewerheroes is a local service based business that provides drain cleaning services. There are a couple things about this business that makes their situation a little more challenging then many local area businesses but by and large the challenges they are facing with not showing up in Google Search are much the same for many local service businesses.
The Challenges
- Service area business as ppposed to a fixed location business
- Two Main Service Areas – Airdrie & Calgary – A suburb outside of large city
- Website had been built using DIY Go Daddy website builder
- No On-Site SEO
- Not showing up in Google Business Listing or Google organic search for any keyword searches
Service Area Business
The first challenge is that they operate as a ‘Service Area’ type of business, meaning that they don’t have a fixed business address. They operate as a completely mobile service van and do not have a commercial office or shop location. The problem that these types of businesses face is that it is very hard to compete in Google Business Listings because they don’t have a location that displays on maps.
The second challenge that is somewhat unique to Sewerheroes is trying to compete in two different geographic areas. They don’t have a physical location but the owner lives in Airdrie, not Calgary and you guessed it, the majority of the population is in Calgary.
You might think that because you set up your Google Business Listing without a fixed address, that this shouldn’t matter but Google still really knows… You may have used your home address when registering your domain, or there is likely some type of citation that lives on the web that has your actual physical location attached to it.
So, this is a situation that we see often. A service area business that is located outside of a large center and wanting to attract search traffic from the larger population that they reside just outside of.
DIY Website Builders…
Anyone can build a website, right? Well yeah, it isn’t rocket science but there is a big difference between having a website and having a website that gets found when your customers are searching for what you sell.
Sewerheroes had a website built on Go Daddy website builder and I will be honest, it looked great. I am not kidding, they had already spent a ton of time on branding and coming up with the whole play on super heroes that just looked amazing.
The problem though, the main problem that is and the one that everyone wants to know about is that I could count the number of people looking at the website each week on one hand. That’s right, no search traffic finding the site at all…
So, while all these website builders may look great and, in a lot of cases, are really easy to use and ANYONE can put together a website in a couple hours… they don’t provide you with the infrastructure that is needed for search engines to figure them out, index them and start moving you up the ranks to beat out your competition.
If you have watched any of my stuff, I say this too often, but I will say it again, for me the truth is good enough and the truth is that most of these companies are hosting companies and all the tools they provide, like website builders, are just there to help get you hooked into their hosting so they earn residual income from you month after month and year after year…. there I said it.
What Sewerheroes needed, is what every local business needs in my opinion. WordPress, which is really the engine that drives a properly structured website to climb to page one.
Case Study – Part #1
We started with Sewerheroes by building them a new website on the world class website framework of wordpress. I have already said, they had previously done an amazing job with branding and the physical layout of the website itself didn’t really look all that different from the original once we were done.
What wordpress does for us is provide some tools, called plugins, which help us give Google and other search engines all the information they require so they can make sense of the website. This is the structural component of Search Engine Optimization and the starting point in achieving top Local SEO rankings, which simply means getting the website to speak in Google’s language so they can communicate and understand what services or products your business provides and what geographical area you serve… We simply use wordpress so we can speak ‘Google’.
Keywords & Technical SEO
It starts with a thorough understanding of the keywords.
Keywords are the phrases that your prospects use to search on Google and other search engines when they are looking for your services but don’t know your business by name.
We don’t include your Brand keywords here, like Sewerheroes… Your site will rank well enough for your brand terms and we would expect that the people who know you by name will also search for you by name.
Keyword or longtail keyword phrases are found by doing research. We spend a lot of time researching your competitors keywords so we can understand the gaps in search results that your site may have now in comparison to your top ranked competitors.
For Sewerheroes, part #1 of this Case Study focuses on the first improvements we made in their local Airdrie Market. By starting close to home and growing out, we are able to provide a case to the search engines that the website is an authority within the region. This is done through a complex process of content creation and linking content on the site in a certain way.
This is the difference between just anyone building a website and putting together a website with killer SEO. Instead of having a bunch of pages or posts spread out wide or covering too many topics we create these deep vaults of knowledge based content within your site that we call silo’s.
Our silo’s are structured through internal links so that the search engines understand which pages are the most important pages on your site and what keywords they are important too…
In short, we talk ‘Google’ to make you look like the expert in your industry in your area so Google can then decide to deliver your website as a search results for searchers looking for the best information on the topic.