Local Party Rental Supplier
Traffic and Sales for this Local Party Supply Company Bounced Higher Than Ever With SEO
Details about how we helped this local beloved business. Our SEO efforts increased the number of phone calls and qualified website traffic, and increased the number of inbound leads by 3,842%
Services Implemented
SEO
WordPress SEO
Technical SEO
Blog Management
Link Building
Facebook Marketing
The Results
Analytics Highlight
Each year during the client’s busy season organic search traffic grew between as little as 35% and as much as 1,500% compared to the year prior. During the 5-year period of time shown above organic search traffic grew 7,165% to this client’s website.
About the Company
A local family-owned party rental supplier loved by their local community and reeling from a loss in the family. Their website traffic was suffering, the phone was not ringing, and only some of their repeat customers were coming back.
Our client had just taken over as the sole owner of the company due to a death in the family. While the client had prior experience running the business and being the face of the business, how the leads came to them was a mystery to her. While she is an amazing business-woman and loved by her clientele, business was starting to taper off and the client was not sure why, but believed it had something to do with SEO or their website.
After listening to the client’s problems and concerns our founder Joe Youngblood began researching and discovered a variety of problems likely impacting the business. One of the largest problems was that the website did not have any analytics tracking installed. Once this was created and installed the client agreed to wait one full week so we could examine the small amount of data for clues. Unfortunately for her, the website received a grand total of zero website visitors over this period of time from any sources.
The client’s previous business partner and spouse had also dabbled in blackhat SEO tactics, doing everything possible to drive traffic to the website in hopes of gaining phone calls or email leads.
The website itself was also in drastic need of an upgrade. An HTML+CSS website it only had a few pages, minimal content, outdated graphics, broken functionality, and used hidden text to try and hide keyword spam at the bottom of the site (a dated SEO tactic even for the time we started). While this had clearly worked previously based on the client describing a thriving business the year prior, we theorized that search engines had begun deranking the site months before we started working so that when we installed Google Analytics we were not able to record any visits – A grand total of 0 visitors in the first month.
Finally, even the email address on the site used to gather leads was not functioning, we discovered that the email host the client used was auto forwarding the emails to another email account managed by Microsoft which had determined all of those emails were spam. What few returning clients were going to the business and reaching out via email were all being lost to this filter. Only those that called in were getting through.
The client essentially had no website traffic, no keyword rankings, and no inbound leads for a business where they were suddenly in charge of the marketing. They had less than an estimated 25% of clients returning and making successful contact. Outside of a handful of referrals, they were not getting new business.
How they Won With SEO
Services Ordered:
After assessing the client’s current website and needs we recommended several services that would help us drive more new leads for her business including:
- SEO
- Local SEO
- Lead Generation
- Facebook Marketing
- Blog Management
- WordPress SEO
- Technical SEO
- Link Building
- Onpage Optimization
- SEO Website Design
The Solution:
Compounding the problems our new client faced were three major obstacles.
- The business is highly competitive in their region.
- The business has a limited season which can also be obstructed by weather events.
- The business hired us at the start of their busy season when they needed results the most but we estimated great results wouldn’t hit for about 180 days, right when their off-season started.
This presented enormous challenges to reach success before the next busy season, but has also provided ongoing complications over the ensuing years since then (see “OnGoing” below).
To achieve success we would lean on two of our marketing strategies:
We started our approach by examining where our competitors were not and finding ways to use that to our advantage. Then we plunged the client into a lot of SEO work during the off-season in preparation for the coming year. We repeat this pattern yearly to keep driving gains and keep competitors at bay.
1. The Website Redesign
After examining our client’s needs one of the first things we worked on was the new website design. Since it can take a designer anywhere from 30 to 90 days to finish a website after we write up specifications for it, doing this first would help use our time more efficiently.
The new website would be built on WordPress in order for us to leverage our WordPress SEO package for the client, most competitors use a website hosting company focused on the industry giving us an edge out of the gate. The design was to be fun and lively with bright colors, and a spring/summer-like feel to it, to help the site appeal to parents of children.
The website architecture would be designed to use the ‘Posts’ functionality for blog posts giving tips and advice on throwing parties for kids, and to use the ‘Pages’ functionality to build out pages for each category searchers look for and for separate pages for each specific party rental product available.
Not only did the designer we partnered with deliver on this project, but it also won a MarCom Gold Award for Best Website Redesign 2016.
2. Initial SEO Work
Since the current website had extremely little content on it, we did not have a lot of SEO potential in building links or writing effective content for pages. Since it was an HTML site and a CMS based one was on the way, it would be highly inefficient to build out new HTML+CSS based pages with content that would then have to moved at great labor to the CMS based site. Instead we settled on starting off with some simpler SEO work. During this phase we disavowed links from the businesses blackhat past, helped the client clean up signage on their physical building location, fixed their Google Business listing data, and worked on building citations across the web.
3. Facebook for Immediate Results
Since the client hired us during busy season and we knew SEO wouldn’t help her quickly enough we examined the possibility of using PPC and/or social media for more immediate success. The client preferred to use Social Media and noted that many of her past clients had mentioned a few Facebook Groups where they found other party suppliers/vendors for kids birthday parties. We reviewed this Groups and found more, then gave our client tips on how to engage with users in these Groups and not spam to earn business.
4. The Lead Generation Fix
We had to fix the client’s lead generation problem; it was paramount that no matter what she be able to easily get leads from her website. Previously she would field calls on her mobile phone and then login to her PC to read her email each morning and call the previous days leads (when they actually came into the site). Since the new website would use WordPress we recommended and installed Gravity Forms. Every page on her site would then include a form to request more information about a specific type of product. We then have these leads sent to a new Gmail account created for her so she can open the emails up via the Gmail app on her phone. The leads would also include the page where the person filled out the form and the phone numbers would be click-to-call.
Gravity Forms does an incredible job at fighting website form spam, and while some spam slips through, most of the emails she gets now are high-quality leads marketing qualified (i.e. hot) and ready to commit to a transaction.
5. The SEO Plan
Our client serves several suburbs of a highly populated city in North America. Most of her competitors focus on trying to win SEO traffic from the largest city based on the search volume data that can be gleaned for various keyword tools showing how much traffic there is for that term versus terms of the more targeted communities. Our client was no different, initially focused on the larger city which sat just on the outside edge of her service area. Instead our SEO plan would be to tightly focus on the initial location at first and then grow outwards from there. We also wanted to build specific pages for the products she had in her inventory as well as their closely related uses. The site also creates guides for local kid-friendly / family-friendly things which her target audience (Moms / Parents) might be looking for. Finally our SEO plan called for at least one blog post per month giving out advice on how to throw a type of party for kids.
To gain links to the site to power SEO we use a variety of tactics. Those include:
- Boosting Facebook Posts with Links to Content
- Having the Client be a Resource for Journalists
- Having the Client be a contributor to a relevant publication
- Cold outreach to gain links to Content from related sources
Once we had our website online and had our local SEO efforts in place we helped the client build out a review gathering process to obtain reviews for her website and for various local directories such as Google Maps.
Finally, we built out service area pages for the client. These pages highlight a local city or neighborhood where our client does business. Each page contains the most frequently requested rental items in that area, shows off reviews from past customers in the area, and gives out tips specific to the location that are relevant to client’s business.
6. Ongoing Work
SEO and Digital Marketing never end. As mentioned earlier the client is under constant pressure from fierce competition, and also deals with clients who only need her service for a relatively brief period of time before they are no longer qualified. That means she has to generate new business each and every year just to maintain her business or grow it.
Here are many of the things we have done to help aid the ongoing success and growth of her party rental supply business.
- Stopped nearly a dozen attacks on her business profile data which attempted to erase it.
- Obtained high-value links from prestigious websites.
- Were able to get the business profile on Google Maps unsuspended after it was erroneously taken down.
- Discovered a high-ranking competitor domain for sale, secured it, and redirected it to client.
- Found a new way to make the website load even faster, implemented it.
- Monitored, fixed, and improved Technical SEO to win through various Google updates.