How We Helped Louisiana Custom Closets Slay a Giant
There’s nothing wrong with the big guy until he starts tormenting you in your own backyard.
That’s how Louisiana Custom Closets felt when they would sit in their own office and do a Google search for “Custom Closets”. Every time they did, California Closets would occupy the first couple of spots, usually followed by Ultimate Storage Solutions.
In the best case scenario, Louisiana Custom Closets showed up in position three on page one. Now you may be thinking to yourself, “position three isn’t bad”. We certainly understand that for the guy whose results reside on page two, that page one - position three sounds like a dream come true.
This study by Moz shows that there is a major difference though between the CTR (click through rate) of position one versus position three. See the exact numbers below.
- Position one: 31.24%
- Position two: 14.04%
- Position three: 9.8%
(The image above is from the MOZ article referenced)
So that means for every 100 searches performed, the company who owns that number one position is going to get 21 more clicks than the company in position three, or just over 300% better CTR.
When you consider the brand recognition that a company like California Closets has over a company like Louisiana Custom Closets, you can see where being outranked in the search results was consistently costing them potential sales.
California Closets is a giant. Luckily, we’re not afraid of giants at 5 Stones. Our name comes from the Biblical account of David and Goliath, and this story aligns very well with that one, straight through to the end.
When we started this project, the first thing we did was a complete audit of the website. This website had previously been worked on by another SEO company, so a lot of the basics were in place. Still, we were able to identify issues.
One of the problems we found was that the website responded as multiple domain names. This was a pretty big problem because the search engines see multiple domain names as multiple websites with the exact same content. Duplicate content is something that the search engines will penalize you for, especially when it is excessive. This was an easy fix, though. We simply made it so that the website responded only as louisianacustomclosets.com and then made the other domains redirect to that one.
The next problem we found was that the logo was wrapped in H1 header tags. Header tags are wrapped around certain content on each page of a website. If you think about it like an outline, the H1 would be the outline’s overall title. The H2 would be a section title, and the H3 would be the title over a set of bullet points. These header tags simply establish a hierarchy within the content of the page. There should only be a single H1 header tag per page, and it should tell what that page of the website is about. In this case, every page had at least two H1 tags and one of them was a logo. We simply removed the H1 tags from the logo and it fixed this problem sitewide.
Once these issues, along with a handful of others were resolved, we moved on to building content on the website. In this day and age of SEO, content is king. The search engines want to see a website that is an authority on a topic. This is done by adding high quality content to the website on a consistent basis. We do this through blog posts.
Since we first started this project we have added over 100 blog posts to this website. That equates to over 100 pages of quality content on the topic of closets, pantries, garages, storage, and organization. When you add “local intent” to the searches, this website is THE authority on the topic.
Speaking of local, no SEO strategy is complete without local SEO. For local we have completed an audit and optimization of Louisiana Custom Closets’ Google My Business page, a MOZ Local campaign, and citation building campaign. This has placed LCC firmly at the top of Google’s 3 Pack.
Search Engine Optimization is a long term commitment. It took 5 months to overtake California Closets in searches performed in and around Covington, just over a year for searches performed in New Orleans, and almost 2 years for Baton Rouge area searches.
Louisiana Custom Closets now firmly holds the number one position for most of the searches performed inside of their service area, and those searches are now supplemented with a PPC campaign. In most cases, when a person searches for closet related queries, they will see Louisiana Custom Closets in the paid ads, in the 3 pack, and as the first organic result.
They have gone from the little guy being tormented by a giant in their backyard to being crowned King, and we supplied the stones and the sling!
Let us help you slay your giant. Get started today!