Local SEO Case Study: Majestic Steel Increased Impressions By 319% & Local Service traffic by 185%

319% increase in SEO impressions

185% raise in SEO clicks on their local service pages

33% boost to lead conversions (from SEO)

264% increase in overall SEO traffic

Started in Connecticut in 1979 by Dennis Leebow, then founded in the Cleveland, Ohio area, Majestic Steel is a longstanding player in the American steel industry.

Client Background: Majestic Steel: Steel Distributor & Metal Industry Supplier

Their rolled steel solutions in the Midwest have remained strong for decades and, in recent years, they have expanded to states like Texas, Florida, and California through a mixture of acquisitions and expansions to bring their products to markets across the United States.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, Majestic Steel saw the stalling supply lines as an opportunity to consolidate supply and skyrocket to prominence in the domestic steel manufacturing industry. They accumulated their supply to take the risk off of their customers and allow them to continue providing steel while the rest of the market recovered.

During this time, Majestic Steel sought to expand their online presence and capitalize on this opportunity. Majestic Steel’s CMO and Executive Vice President Kate Mitchell and Senior VP of Marketing, Jamie Reutershan, reached out to Why Stuff Sucks to supercharge their search engine visibility.

The Challenge: Building Local SEO Success From On-The-Ground Experience

When we were brought on board, Majestic Steel was already a thriving company with a strong handle on their market and process, but being the best in an industry doesn’t necessarily translate to growing SEO traffic (although, it certainly doesn’t hurt). To thrive on search engine results pages, you need a solid site structure, a strong backlink profile, and an expert SEO strategy to carry you into the future.

Local SEO refers to optimizing for a specific local area (one major city typically), and you can also leverage this to optimize for many different areas, each with its own page, keywords, and search visibility.

There are 2 locations you can rank for in Local SEO. Both take different approaches to achieve visibility, but having both causes the sum to be greater than the individual parts.

  1. Google Business Profile (the Map Pack). This requires you to have a physical location/address.
  2. Organic Listing (below the Map Pack): This requires a special built “local service landing page” for each city + service you want to rank for.

Capturing local business takes a lot more than putting your home city’s name + product/service on a website page and calling it a day. And for companies like Majestic, they want to rank for multiple cities across the US; we call this multilocation SEO.

To rank in each city you want to rank in, local SEO success requires identifying the cultural, service, and purchasing differences between locations and weaving those differences into each city’s page on your website in a cohesive manner, strengthening your existing site and your local service pages in the process.

Assessing The Field With An Initial SEO Competitor Analysis

Before we moved forward with our local SEO audit, we wanted to get a lay of the land and performed a competitor audit. This yielded many opportunities and uncovered that Majestic Steel had low SEO traffic share compared to competitors.

When analyzing Majestic’s direct competitors, we located 738 keywords that they were not currently ranking for, leaving the field wide open for where they could expand.

Analyzing The Foundation With A Technical SEO Audit

Next up for analysis was Majestic Steel’s technical performance to find issues lingering in the foundation of their site. The various issues contributed to a C – (minus) score so there was definite room for improvement, and we recommended fixing a number of issues so they wouldn’t hold back our local SEO work to come.

We didn’t just send them a list of items to fix and call it a day. Rather we prioritized the issues for them based on what effort would yield the most impact.

We focused on resolving the following high-priority issues preventing the site from ranking better:

Creating Strategy + Executing A Local SEO Campaign

Once the website’s technical foundation had been solidified, we created strategy and recommendations from keyword research connecting each city or state to connect with the opportunity in each local market.

With the 2 places we can rank for local searches, we got to work:

Building a localized page for any location is far more involved than subbing in a city name. Authentic and effective local seo strategy requires analyzing the local search of your chosen region and building intriguing pages around those keywords.

Here’s a breakdown of all the local pages and Google Business Profile recommendations.

We saw the following local SEO improvement based on our work. First off, the local service pages had SEO impressions and clicks up 72% and 174% respectively.

And all of the 8 city’s Google Business Profiles which we had optimized were getting increased interactions.

Link Building: Why It Sucks & How It Doesn’t Have to

One of the least understood and most impactful aspects of search engine optimization is building backlinks (getting quality, relevant links from other sites to demonstrate/validate to Google your expertise).

Knowing what makes a good backlink (vs one that doesn’t help or could hurt) and how to get them without going bankrupt separates an inexperienced junior-level SEO person from a true expert.

Why Stuff Sucks obtained 34 high quality backlink, and as you can see we got increasing results. It really goes to show that you don’t need a ton of links, just a few high quality ones to move the needle.

The Results: Building Organic Traffic Strong As Steel

Through their combination of Local SEO, technical overhauls, and high-quality backlinking, Why Stuff Sucks delivered record performance to Majestic Steel, as shown by the following statistics:

While it wasn’t an area we focused our SEO efforts on, once we got increasing results for other parts of their site, their career page had increasing SEO impressions (30%) and clicks (54%). It’s cool to see a site getting rewarded indirectly for other quality work they’re doing.

Majestic Steel’s Experience in Their Own Words…

 

“Highly recommend! We worked with Miles on improving our SEO visibility in Google searches. He was great at teaching us how SEO strategy works, what we needed to do to create better SEO content, and how to optimize our website for inbound marketing. During our time together, we saw 60% growth in organic Google traffic & noticeable growth in leads/sales to our site.

Miles was thorough in his SEO approach to maximize our website results, focused on prioritizing changes to get us leads faster, thoughtful in his educational approach, and flexible enough to pivot from one business line to another when our needs evolved.” (review left on Google)

– James Reutershan, Senior Marketing Vice President @ Majestic Steel

Looking For SEO Success In Local SEO?

If you’re looking to expand your business through online search (Google, Bing or AI), Why Stuff Sucks has done it before and will do it again with ease.

Through a signature combination of data-backed practices and transparent communication, we know we will get increased business results for every engagement.

Reach out today and see what we can build for you.