Brooke Shigley Portfolio

Lawn Care Case Study

Background on the Brand

Before we proceed with the case study, I’ll give you a brief background about the client.

Client works in the home service line industry in lawn and landscaping which are difficult terms to rank for
They didn't have anyone working on their website previously. Just one and done, no monitoring or SEO strategy
Our goal was to increase traffic and conversions by implementing service line pages and a new site structure and also optimizing his GBP

Issues We Had

Our main keywords were directing traffic to the homepage because the website didn't have stand-alone service line pages. Having an SEO background, I knew our competitors would have individual service line pages with quality content that optimizes for the industry keywords we're up against.

When we checked the website, 85% of the pages that are contextually relevant to the target term “lawn care and landscaping” were linked to the homepage.

The SEO Solution?

We did extensive keyword research and updated our keywords quite a bit to rank. Our strategy focused on the following:

The entire website structure was too cluttered, too many pages with duplicate content, it lacked structure, and it was difficult to navigate.
There was also no inner linking on the site and the new service pages allowed us to send paid ads, organic posts, and blogs to those pages and vice versa.
The content required a lot of improved writing, we needed to combine pages, and contextual relevancy to the target keywords, key phrases, and pages.

Solution 1: Restructuring the Site Map

The initial site structure was all over the place and we needed to cut some of the duplicated content down and make our service line pages top nav with sub-pages to support.

I wrote out a new hierarchy, re-organizing the pages and distributing the equity that previously lived on the homepage to the relevant service line pages.

Previously all pages lived in the navigation, so we removed them and moved only the top services to the nav
The top service line pages never existed so most of the content was built into content blocks on the home page
Duplicate content was found across several pages so I dug into the traffic and found that they were not ranking and were just competing against each other

The new site structure enables a more logical and relevant relationship for each page's content while allowing the pages on the succeeding levels to gain authority from the homepage. See below.

Solution 2: Add Inner-linking, Meta, and Alt tags

As mentioned, most of the equity of the keywords was either on the homepage or duplicated throughout the site. So instead of adding all of those pages to the navigation and cluttering that space, we were able to address sub-service pages that fell under tier service lines pages with inner linking. This kept the homepage from cannibalizing all the rankings for target keywords, kept our nav clean, and helped with our on-page SEO. The pages lacked Meta and alt tags so we went through and optimized the backend of the site pages.

Solution 3: Improve Website Content

The entire site had a considerable amount of content, but it was stagnant and poorly written, with a lot of errors. We re-wrote the majority of the site with quality content to support the unique services and selling proposition of the company. To prevent affecting any current rankings of the website, we kept any existing content that ranked and added it to the service line pages.

After 90 Days We Saw Traffic and Conversions Improved

After applying these solutions, we were able to:

Increase traffic 115.1% from the end of March through June and increased conversions by 73.7%.