SEO Case Study
Hillis Brothers Painting
0 To 19,340 Organic Visitors
The Challenges
Hillis Brothers Painting is THE premier painter in Grand Rapids. Unfortunately, their 104 5-star reviews weren’t enough to rank them on the first page of Google. Actually, they recieved all of their traffic from Facebook and recieved 0 organic visitors from Google when we started our SEO campaign.
Campaign Start Important Stats
- Campaign Start Date: Jan 1st, 2020
- On the bottom of Pg. 2 for the target keyword “House Painter Grand Rapids”
- Receiving zero organic traffic and never more than 400 total users per month
Goals
- Identify why they weren’t receiving any organic traffic.
- Increase the number of keywords in Google’s top 10 and top 3 organic rankings
- Increase their domain authority to power their site into the first page of Google in Grand Rapids, MI.
- Rank #1 in Grand Rapids for the keyword “house painter Grand Rapids”
- Increase conversions and sales through the site
Strategy
Our first SEO task was running an on-page and technical audit. We found a few issues that we wanted to tackle right away.
- Their homepage didn’t list all their services, and didn’t link to internal pages like location pages, service pages, and sales pages.
- Their Wix website was slow as they uploaded content over years and years without factoring in speed.
- The location pages and services pages they did have were thin, failing to reach our 1,000-word benchmark.
- Their homepage, the most powerful page, targeted a city with less than 50,000 people when they did most of their business in Grand Rapids, a city with 200,000 people.
After optimizing all of their current SEO assets, our next strategy was to implement a content marketing strategy. The idea was that you could only add so much content, internal links, and citations/backlinks to their existing website.
How can we dramatically increase their search traffic and domain authority?
We deeply analyzed hundreds of online painting blogs to find keywords that received traffic but had a low difficulty. We wrote a series of blog posts that ranked quickly thanks to our content writing and backlinking strategy.
We’d built out every location and service page covering every painting keyword in their service area. With this finished, we moved our focus to content marketing, publishing about two blogs a week. To accelarate the ranking of our new blogs, we strategically built links to them through guest posting.
As the blogs started to rank, they naturally past link equity to the service pages, location pages, and homepage. This resulted in an overall increase in rankings to all pages.
Results
- After 6 months, we grew organic search traffic from O to 4,783 monthly users.
- After 9 months, we grew organic traffic to 9,651 users.
- Reached a peak of 20,783 users after 18 months.
- After 18 months, we ranked #1 for the keyword “painter grand rapids” and nearly every related long-tail keyword.
- 104 conversions in August 2023 including 58 estimates, 33 phone calls, and 13 form fills
