Westside Plumbing supported the local Fort Worth community long before the Webmasters existed.
In fact, when owner Matt Paetzold approached our company in 2016, the seasoned plumber already had 25 years of experience under his belt.
Given his team’s history and tenure in the area, Westside Plumbing should have been a superstar in online searches. Unfortunately, It wasn’t earning nearly as much traffic as it should have.
Given the company’s long history, we knew online branding would be as important as our usual SEO work.
So we hopped into action, overhauled the company’s digital marketing strategy, and completely remade its website.
Westside Plumbing continues to grow, serving a community almost 2800 square miles long.
In this case study, we’ll explore our strategy for enhancing the company’s branding efforts, radically improving its online traffic volume, and updating its web presence for modern plumbing SEO.
We’ll also dig into the challenges that we faced along the way.
Be sure to read along carefully and take notes for your own company.
Challenges With Westside
Company tenure in the physical world has little impact on its digital branding.
People mistakenly believe Google is some sort of omniscient, gelatinous blob that knows everything about everyone.
That’s simply not the case. As far as Google is concerned, your company doesn’t exist until you create a GMB account (or at least a website).
Westside Plumbing’s online presence was nonexistent.
That meant we’d need to set up the basics for the company’s online branding before any progress could be made.
Shifting SEO industry trends during the project prompted us to update our original website design and optimization practices.
Despite these challenges, our team produced pretty spectacular business results.
Our Digital Marketing Strategy
Local Branding Work
For starters, we targeted four key areas of local search optimization:
- Domain Name
- Google Business Profile (GMB)
- Client Reviews
- DataPins
First, we got to work securing a fitting domain name for the company.
We settled on https://www.westfortworthplumbing.com/ and connected with the service area.
We then set up the company’s Google Busines Profile, an incredibly important asset for plumbing professionals who want to rank in local search results.
Google Business listings are perfect for uploading photos, sharing promotions, and answering popular questions about your business.
Finally, we heavily encouraged Matt and his team to start collecting reviews for Westside consistently.
Client feedback, especially Google Reviews, serves as key signals for the search algorithm’s ranking process in local search.
It took some time for the team to get used to the process, but they got the hang of it in a couple of years.
At the end of 2016, Westside Plumbing had only 5 reviews.
By the end of 2017, they had just over 30, and the impact of any negative reviews they had in the past was starting to shrink.
Now, they have 201 Google Reviews and a 4.8-star rating.
DataPins
Each of our clients gains access to DataPins, allowing plumbers to showcase recent projects throughout their service areas.
The DataPins app converts these jobs into consolidated Local SEO signals to improve rankings and conversions.
Westside Plumbing did its part by publishing over 900 pins to date.
Site Layout and Navigation Strategy
Ultimately, all our efforts hinged on knocking Westside Plumbing’s brand-new site out of the park, and our design team did just that.
The first edition of their custom design focused on easy reading for clients and simplified navigation.
In other words, we wanted anyone landing on the homepage to be able to find their desired service in less than a minute.
It all started with a user-friendly service menu that seamlessly adapted to whatever size screen we threw at it—mobile-friendliness is a must for design these days.
Next, we built category blocks to guide visitors to the site’s service pages, offering more detailed information about each service.
These service pages drive rankings for a wider variety of terms. Westside Plumbing now shows up for thousands of keyword combinations. More on that later.
Page Optimization
We reevaluated our content optimization process for Westside. While the site produced some great results, industry changes revealed opportunities for further enhancement.
Late that year, we updated the current design with a modernized aesthetic, keeping the logo and color schemes that defined the brand.
More importantly, we updated the written material on each page with a diversified, localized keyword strategy.
We utilize that same successful strategy for all our thriving clients, as it helps produce steady lead generation while the brand slowly ranks up for more competitive terms.
The new writing style also made for a friendlier reading experience, encouraging higher conversion rates.
Finally, we fully optimized all photos throughout the site.
The site already boasted a slew of original images – surprisingly rare photos on company websites, making them gold for SEO – which added more personality to the brand.
When it became clear that Google had started closely inspecting image facets in the search crawling process, our project content writer added new, keyword-rich image titles and alt attributes.
Westside Project Results
Since our digital marketing project began in 2016, Westside Plumbing has become a powerful staple in the online Fort Worth community.
As mentioned, the company’s service area has expanded dramatically in the last four years, covering a massive 2800-square-mile patch of Greater Fort Worth.
It’s not just their team and service capacity growing either.
The company’s website delivers exceptionally high-quality leads to the business each week.
You can see the last 12 months’ Google Analytics data below:
Final Thoughts
Many of our clients experience Westside Plumbing’s story. It’s not one of sudden and shocking growth, leading to unprecedented revenue boosts and dramatic top rankings.
Instead, Westside is a story of steady, consistent brand development over time.
Thanks to our long-term efforts, the company has expanded its service area and provided exceptional service to more people than ever before.
It took time and hard work on our part and from Matt’s team, but they’ve earned every bit of growth we’ve secured for them.
They started with practically zero online exposure. Westside Plumbing is earning most of its revenue from organic search results.
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