Our subject is a small mom-and-pop garage door company out of West Haven, CT. They hired us to rebuild their website in July. Our client had a modest budget so we built a site with roughly 8 pages and launched in about 30 days. We identified a few challenges.
- The GMB (Google My Business) listing was nowhere to be found except when you search the client’s name. We identified what we believed to be the problem. The category was listed as “Contractor,” not “Garage Door Supplier”.
- Even after submitting this website to Google, his website was so far down the search results. There was no way anyone was going to find his website.
- Locally, like most cities, there was a large amount of fake/spam GMB accounts. These were preventing our client from showing up because they had generic names like “Garage Door Repair West Haven.”
- The SEO budget was/is small so we could only spend a limited amount of time on this account and still be profitable.
Those were our four challenges. I’m going to go through each and share how we fixed the issues, then the results a little over a month after starting our SEO strategy.
Google My Business Listing
First, we changed the category. However, when we did, it put a strike through the new category almost like it was rejecting it. I’d never seen this before so I did some research and found nothing. I then went on a few SEO forums and asked for help. Joy Hawkins was kind enough to take some time out to assist. She said she had run across this previously, and it was an issue caused by an API that had rights to the account, possibly something like a Yext or Moz. She explained how to disconnect them. That resolved, we saw immediate results. We had optimized their GMB account so he was showing up in the #3 spot on most major searches in West Haven.
New Website
Even though we built an SEO friendly garage door website, we hadn’t actually performed SEO on the website yet. So, the website was extremely low (no higher than page 6). Our client hired us for SEO in August. We performed our research and started working on it mid-August. After this, we felt confident that we could rank well for high traffic broad keywords in West Haven, then go out further.
We now have the website on page 1 for local search terms that are the broadest and highest performing keywords in the area. This happened in a very short time frame. It doesn’t always work that way, and we have seen websites get a huge jump like that and fall a bit. Getting websites to rank on page one isn’t the biggest challenge. Getting them to stick is. It’s constant work. Ultimately our goal is to get to the #1 or #2 spot organically and in the 3 pack locally for all major searches.
Fighting Spam in GMB
We turned our attention to what seemed like a good amount of fake GMB listings. We submitted them for review and had approximately 3 – 4 removed in West Haven. This is huge because they took up valuable real estate, over my client who had 25 reviews for 5-star rating. All I had to do was get him in the top 25 and he could compete. Not many competitors had as good of a reputation as he did/does. After optimizing his GMB and having the fake accounts removed, he immediately jumped to ranking in the top 3 or 4 of our 5 top searches. Since, we’ve had some new spam and he’s dropped to number 4. We will get him in the top two for those shortly.
Budget
Our final challenge is budget restrictions. We sell time. So if you’re budget isn’t large, we can still discuss performance. You will still see results, but the results will take longer.
Check out our client’s website: Garage Door Repair
