[Case Study] How I Helped This Local Construction Client Crushed His Competitors On Google

This is a case study of how I helped my local client in a construction niche dominated his rankings and traffic on Google for his main keywords along with other relevant keywords for the business, generating a consistent flow of business and traffic from Google in just 3 months of work.

Just like any other of my case studies, I’m not going to reveal the website and keywords due to security and privacy reasons. But in this article, you will find some of my overview process of how I went about achieving the results along with various screenshots proof.

Project Background

The client operates in a construction niche (can’t reveal the exact niche) in Australia and he approached me to re-build his website and improve its SEO. The goal is to dominate Google search results by ranking for keywords that are relevant to his business and the locations he provides the services.

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges of this project is to go against some of the reputed companies that have been ranking for years on Google and dominating the SERPs. However, if you know what you’re doing and work smart, you can always win at any SERP, no matter how big your competitors are.

The site also got hit slightly in the May 2022 core update, which resulted in some losses of the keywords. For instance, the main keyword slipped from ranking in the top 5 to page 2.

The Campaign

Here are the overviews of how I approached the campaign:

Highly Functional and Appealing Website

The first step for this campaign was to rebuild the entire website. The site was already built using WordPress, so the re-designing process wasn’t difficult. The process includes things like switching to a modern and SEO-friendly theme (Kadence was chosen in this case), making the page layout more user-friendly, adding high-quality original images, and improving the page loading time.

On-Page Optimization

Next up is to focus on the on-page obsessively. What I mean by “obsessively” here is to optimize each and every detail to the tee.

The on-page strategy for this site was to rank the homepage for the main keyword for the main location and create a bunch of highly-targeted location pages that are unique and high-quality.

Service pages were also created to rank for additional services that the client provides. Later down the line, we also created some informational content that helps answer user questions as well. Things like “how much does X cost in X city”, etc. However, the main goal is to rank for service pages (commercial intent), so we only added 5-6 pieces of informational content in total.

Here’s the breakdown of the on-page process for each page:

Heading (h1,h2 & h3) optimization
Page structure optimization and addition of sub-topics:

By structuring the page in such a way that there are logical connections from one section to another. For example, I started the page with an introduction to the service and company, followed by the services provided, then reasons to hire the company, etc. All these subtopics are important for service pages as they answer the questions related to the intent.
Sentence-level optimization using semantically relevant keywords:

By making sure that each sentence is properly optimized using semantically relevant keywords based on reverse engineering the competitors and using a proprietary tool that I created. You can use on-page tools like Surfer-SEO to help with the process.
Internal links:

Make sure every other page on the website is internally linked up to the main page to form a semantic connection for the overall topic on the website. For the anchor text, I mainly used the exact match keyword and the partial-matched keyword.
URL optimization
Keyword count and variation optimization:

Making sure that I have used the right frequency of each keyword on the page. For example, for the word “renovation”, I made sure to check the competitors’ average and see how many times I should use this word. You can again, use tools like Surfer SEO, but there’s really no hard rule for this. I’d like to keep it a little lower than the average to avoid over-optimization.
Entity connection establishment:

This is a special tactic that I used to help Google understand the website’s entity better by essentially connecting the website to other properties via links and having a proper about us page to ensure that Google understands what the site is all about. What you can do here is have a proper about us page, with a proper introduction to the business and things you do. For example, you can use a sentence like: “We are ABC and we offer XYZ”. Use a simple sentence and tell Google who you are and what you do.

Off-Page Optimization

Once the on-page of site is ready, the next step is to start looking into off-page factors.

Some of the things that I did are:

Press release from high-quality resources with semantic establishment optimization:

Press release is one of my favorite link building techniques and still works really well today. I’d like to use either brand name or URL as the anchor text for safety reason. I recommend you use this for the newer website to help establish the initial authority.
Citations from high-quality directories and social profiles
Reviews and sentiment establishment:

Off-page reviews and what people say about your site (entity) is another important ranking signal for local SEO. So, I asked the client to ask his clients to leave positive reviews on some of the big directories like YellowPages, Yelp, etc.
Engagement optimizations:

I talk about how user signals are very important to your SEO strategy all the time and for this local SEO case study, I also made sure to run some engagement campaigns to help build up brand recognition and engagement.
Obtaining high-quality links using guest posts and some private links