Property Restoration Franchise SEO Case Study
With hundreds of locations across the U.S., this property restoration franchise had experienced significant drops in its organic rankings and traffic during the prior year without a clear explanation. Hoping to reverse these trends and outrank its nationally recognized competitors in local search engines, the franchise pursued SEO services.
Beginning in Spring 2023, I was tasked with creating and implementing white label SEO strategies to address both technical and content issues that were diminishing their website’s visibility in search.
Before
Website Metrics Before SEO Strategies
Below are two graphs from February 2023 that show the website’s overall organic traffic and rankings. The first graph shows total organic visitors going to this property restoration site from Google and other search engines. The second graph features their keyword rankings in positions #1 – #20 in the same time frame.
In the beginning of February 2023, this restoration website received about 250 organic visitors and ranked for a total of 47 keywords on Page 1 of Google’s search results.
Strategies
SEO Strategies Performed
Technical Fixes for Indexation Error
To start, I ran an in-depth technical SEO audit to find hidden issues on the website’s backend that were almost certainly harming its search visibility. Almost immediately, I discovered an indexation issue that directly affected the site’s ability to appear in Google search.
A simple edit made to the website’s robots.txt by a former web developer months prior had inadvertently caused the entire site to be marked “noindex.” Any page that is marked noindex cannot be listed in Google results. That meant that all of these website’s pages were slowly being removed from search engines, which explained the precipitous drop in keyword rankings in recent months.
Simple though it may sound, this can be a devastating technical SEO error that removes valuable ranking data from indexes and scrubs years of search engine work from the internet.
To restore its organic visibility in Google, I requested that the current web developer remove a single line of code from the robots.txt file that caused this indexation issue. I placed the franchise site’s pages on a priority crawl list with Google, and urls began to be restored in search engine results over the next few months.
Keyword Optimization & Content Strategy
Beyond fixing that technical error, the bulk of Local SEO services I performed for this property restoration website stemmed from its content needs. These included new keyword research projects that uncovered high-priority, low-competition topics that this restoration company’s competitors had overlooked. Using that data, I created new content calendars for the franchise to use as their foundation for new articles on the site.
In addition to topic ideas for new pages, I also completed content refreshes for their existing pages to strengthen their reach in organic search. With new keyword optimization, metadata and internal linking on some of their highest-value pages, we were able to move the needle in long-term rankings and traffic. Even a simple ranking jump from Position #11 to Position #3 is the difference in hundreds of new monthly clicks from local audiences.
SEO Results 338% Increase in Monthly Traffic
+338%
Organic Traffic
+166%
Page 1 Rankings
In February 2023, the website hovered around 250 visitors with 47 keywords ranking on page 1 of Google. One year later in January 2024, it received 866 visitors with 78 keywords on page 1, including 25 in Positions 1-3.
Results
