About the Client:

Our client was a pool cleaning and pool repair company in the Midwest that had been in business for nearly 30 years. Sales were stagnant as a lot of their old contracts had sold their homes and moved. With word of mouth advertising not being as good as it used to be for them, they found themselves with a lot of trucks, equipment, and labor, but not enough work. This was a phenomenal company, they just had relied on the old way of doing things and the world was changing on them. As many of their competitors were using Google and online ads, they were getting passed by. That's when we came in.

Challenge:

With most of our contractor and home-services related clients, we first look to SEO. Why? Because people in the 21st century go to Google to find help.

For this particular client, they were needed to rank for keywords like "pool repair," "pool opening," "pool cleaners near me," and a ton more, however, they found themselves behind the eight ball. Since they hadn't done anything SEO related, they were basically a brand new company as far as Google was concerned. Not to mention the fact that they wanted to rank in a city with a quarter of a million people that had 20 other pool cleaning companies battling for the top few spots.

Needless to say, we had our work cut out for us.

Solution:

In order to rank our client, we needed a powerful keyword heavy and SEO focused website. So we built a brand new lead generation website for their particular city. We say lead generation because there is a very specific style of website that needs to be built for a local business like this, whereas, a national-based eCommerce or retail type store would be built much differently.

Customers know what a pool cleaning company does, so there wasn't a need to build something crazy that would warm up the lead or get them excited to work with the company. Instead, it's more about creating the site for Google to spot it, rank it, and accelerate the rankings to the top while still maintaining a credible and elegant website. So that's exactly what we did!

To go along with the website, we built Google Ads, Facebook Ads, set up a call tracking number, registered a new Google My Business profile for them, and even did a small video for them to use on the website.

Once it was all built, it was off to the races to use our proprietary SEO strategy to get the site in organic leads as fast as possible.

Here is a quick shot of how the call log looks for our client:

Performance and Results:

Much to our surprise, the website actually took off faster than we expected. Most new websites take a while to index, and then take even longer for Google to trust the site enough to put it into the rankings. On average, we see it taking about 6-10 months for a website to start seeing any kind of real momentum.

We built the site in the early fall of 2017, and by the time we hit the winter of 2018, the website started to pull in a little bit of traffic and a few calls. No real leads yet, but that was to be expected.

As we moved into the high season (Spring) of 2018, we relied a bit more on Google Ads to get the leads starting to flow. The web traffic generated from these leads also helps to push the SEO forward a bit, so that's why we like to take this strategy. Along with the Google Ads, we were also running a few promotional deals through Facebook ads. Working with these in tandem allowed for us to keep our client satisfied while we continued to grow the organic search rankings.

It's important to know how we approach this timeframe with our clients. Essentially, we prepare them to understand that the first year working with us is often going to be a break-even year. Why? Because SEO take a stinking ton of time and labor to work!

Often, we see results faster, but we have to prepare our clients for this reality in case it happens because it most certainly has in other cases.

So throughout 2018, the site continued to grow in the search rankings, but it wasn't really humming yet.

Then we hit 2019 and the momentum really started to roll. We pulled back on Google and Facebook ads and started to rely pretty heavily on the organic search traffic that was coming in because of our SEO efforts. This is where we start to get into the holy grail of online marketing because calls and form fill out leads start pouring in weekly out of the blue.

With pool cleaning being a seasonal business in the Midwest, the high months are March-May and September-October.

Check out this graph here and see how the call leads have progressed. Keep in mind that this is only the calls and NOT the form fill outs. On this website, calls come in at about 70% with 30% coming in through form fill outs on the website:

By 2020, we pulled all ads off the site and are running on just SEO juice. This is ultimately where we and our clients want to be, as there is no more ad spend needed and it's just maintenance SEO. Now, don't get us wrong, it still requires consistent SEO labor to keep our top spot in the location, but as far as the stress goes, that pretty much gets wiped away. It is certainly less stressful to try to keep the #1 spot than it is to try and rise in the rankings.

So far, we've been able to keep our client in the #1 spot ever since late 2019 and we haven't looked back. This is one example of many that we see for our clients.

Summary: 

By utilizing a new SEO friendly website, we started from scratch inside of a city with a population over a quarter of a million and we took our client from getting zero online leads to getting 60-70 leads per month during their high season.