SEO Case Study from 1.7 DR to 10 DR and 931 Organic Keywords

In this SEO Case Study, I want to show you how I increased the website visitors and form fills in just one month. And that SEO isn’t black magic.

What I Want This SEO Case Study To Provide

In this case study, I want to be totally transparent and show you my process of doing SEO and the thought process of how to rank a local business.

The site I am going to show you is real and I have been working with them for about 6 weeks at the time of this writing.

I won’t reveal their information as I want to preserve their privacy and information from people who would purposely write bad reviews etc.

By providing this information I hope to show you that SEO isn’t black magic and that there are no secrets you need to pay to learn.

I have discovered there are only three ingredients to SEO:

1. A properly formatted website
2. Content
3. Backlinks

OK let’s Get Into It

This is what I will demonstrate

• Went from 500 impressions and 2 clicks a day to 1800 impressions a day and 20 clicks
• 300 Citation Links Built
• 20 Tier 1 links built
• Updated and restructured the website
• Updated original content and Technical SEO
• Limited Budget
• The campaign was executed by me alone
• Form fills went from 0 a week to 10-15 a week

Background On The Client

The client operates in the home improvement industry. They exist to help property owners in Florida fix damaged screens and pool cage enclosures.

Prior to our engagement, there had been work done on the site by a so-called SEO company.

Their website existed purely to get potential clients to fill out a form asking for estimates.

The Challenges I Faced

This is where the fun begins.

The site is built on WordPress. It’s almost stitched together using an old 2017 theme and plugins to get the site to work. There was no thought of site hierarchy and ease of navigation or keyword research.

All the posts were 500 words or less and there was an effort with interlinking but no real game plan for growth.

The developers didn’t have time to recreate the website to accommodate things like:

• Theme customization.
• Adding and updating content.
• Updating links and images.
• Any changes made to the website had to go through multiple chains.

Because of how the site was built, Google never bothered to give it any love or attention. I was lucky though because the owner very much wanted to fix the issues and told me to do whatever I needed to do. In short, I didn’t have to get the OK for everything I did which made it easier.

The first thing to do was to fix technical issues

If you look at their search console, you’ll see an almost dead site.

Google wasn’t sending crawlers because there were no sitemaps. And, if I wanted to see any growth at all, I needed to fix that ASAP.

Here’s what I fixed first (I won’t breakdown each detail because, well, that’s boring):

I went in to console and added the site maps
The site was incredibly slow (around 26 seconds full load).

There were and still are a bunch of coverage issues that I will not bore you with and Google was having a pretty hard time navigating the site.

After a week of solidly updating the site with a fresh install of WordPress, a fresh site hierarchy, reducing image sizes, and using the WP Rocket plugin I was able to get the site load speed to 2s on Mobile.

Next Was The Content

The first thing I did was I used some of the content the site already had to create the front page. I created snippets of the about me page and services pages using READ MORE links to the pages themselves.

I created a Service Area page blank and created the individual service area pages changing only the H1 and H2 tags and location tagging using Google information about the area. I did the same with the services pages.

I also installed the Redirection Plugin so when I changed the slugs in the URLs there would be an automatic 301 generated for that page. I had to do this because the previous SEO never thought about searchable keywords.

Next was backlinking

I sent 300 citations to the website and a handful of tier 1 links to the front page, and service area pages to try and raise the Domain rating. I didn’t have a lot of money for backlinks so I tried to strategically place them and not throw them all on the home page

Possible Catastrofy

After I did all this and launched the newly rebuilt site that in my mind was now a Corvette compared to the Model T it was before, nothing happened. At first, I didn’t freak out as I thought it would take a few days for Google to crawl the site and reward me for my hard work.

After four days the traffic was going down in analytics like a stone until there was no traffic at all. I got this real sunken feeling in the pit of my stomach thinking I screwed something up.

I started doubting my capabilities as an SEO and started rethinking everything. But I knew I made the site better, I had reformatted the content so it was targeting searchable keywords and that I could actually rank for them. But as you can see below I was flatlined. WHY!!!

Reincarnation For My SEO Case Study

As I said, I was freaking out. But one thing caught my attention. I was getting form fills? How could I have no traffic and still get form fills? I looked at the search console again. I have been getting impressions and clicks.

My traffic didn’t go down. I started thinking again. Why isn’t analytics showing any traffic? So after a little research, it hit me. I didn’t install the global tracking number on the new site. That had to be it. So after I did that, BINGO!! The site is alive 🙂

Not only that but I was getting targeted traffic from the targeted areas we were targeting

So as you can see now in the ahrefs report I have increased organic keywords, and traffic value, and have raised the domain score. The owner is getting several form fills a day and has shut off his Google ads.

All in all, I think the first 6 weeks have been a success and I look forward to more.

In retrospect, I now do not question my abilities as an SEO. This if I am being honest is my first long-term client. I needed to prove to myself I could actually get results for a local business client and I did.

All my other clients were short term after I implemented what they needed the engagement ended. But this guy wants to go the distance.

I have room for a handful of local business clients. If you would like me to take a look at your website or lack of please visit the contact page and get in touch. See My Google Reviews