Local SEO Case Study: National Flat-Rolled Metals Distributor & Processor Increased Impressions By 319% & Local Service Traffic by 185%

Client Background: National Flat-Rolled Metals Distributor & Processor

Founded in 1979, our client is a longstanding player in the American steel industry. Their rolled steel solutions in the Midwest have remained strong for decades and, in recent years, they have expanded to states across the U.S. through a mixture of acquisitions and expansions to bring their products to markets across the United States.

During this time, they have sought to expand their online presence and capitalize on their expanded reach. To this end, their CMO and Executive Vice President and their Senior VP of Marketing 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, the client 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 that 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 they had low SEO traffic share compared to competitors.

When analyzing their 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 the client’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 checked 65 potential issue areas and identified 24 that were holding their site back from better SEO traffic.
• 13 of those were the highest priority and were recommended to work on first.
• 11 were secondary priority and should be fixed after the 11.

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

• Missing canonical tags
• Orphaned pages
• 404 “broken” pages
• Inconsistent URL Directory/Folder Structure
• Missing breadcrumbs
• Thin content pages
• Low context/value content
• Broken backlinks
• Toxic backlink profile
• Heading 1 tags missing
• Meta descriptions missing
• Images sized over 100kb
• Images missing “alt text”

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:

• Below the map pack (local service landing pages)
• Map pack (Google Business Profile)

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.

• Local service landing pages: Our research uncovered 43 opportunities which we presented to the client and then selected.

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

• Google Business Profile optimization: Next, we analyzed the 8 existing Google Business Profiles and identified areas that could be better optimized for higher visibility in the map pack.

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.

We obtained 34 high quality backlinks, 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, We delivered record performance to the client, as shown by the following statistics:

• 319% increase in overall site SEO impressions.
• 174% growth in clicks to their local service pages
• 264% increase in overall SEO traffic

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.

Our Clients’ Experience in Their Own Words…

Curious what our clients say about us? Let their words validate the experience and results they’ve received over the years.