Confession: We actually achieved 1,025% growth in the previous year too
Client
Homecure Plumbers are one of London’s leading plumbing companies. They provide plumbing services, boiler repairs, installations, and servicing across the UK’s capital.
Homecure’s key goal is improving valuable organic traffic to the site in order to generate leads and become the go-to brand for Londoner’s with any related household issue. With over 10 years in the industry behind them, they were originally unsure how to proceed with two domains being managed and a website not really performing for their business and growth aspirations.
Strategy
Homecure historically relied upon a few core keywords to drive non-brand organic traffic, mostly centred around the blog, which had been dabbled with by a prior agency.
In order to push the site forward, especially in a locally competitive niche like ‘london plumbers’, we had to make sure the site had all three key areas covered; technical, content and authority.
As with any small business like Homecure that hadn’t had much success from its organic marketing efforts previously, we had to work smart in order to ensure wins were happening and the company was seeing a path to the ROI they were hoping for.
Therefore, our focuses in each key area had to be quickly actionable, whilst focusing on the opportunities offering the highest ROI. To do this we focused on the following:
- ‘Quick Wins’ Technical Audit
- SEO Strategy
- Content Production
- Service pages
- Geographically focused content
- Blog posts
- Content-less Link Building
This was our core focus through 2019 and, largely through 2020 as well. However, with triple digit growth for the site, we were also able to start focusing on some of the bigger opportunities for the company, which then expanded to the following in 2020:
- Website redesign & migration
- Digital PR campaigns
Technical SEO
Early in 2019, our first port-of-call was to spend a few days reviewing the technical setup of the domain from an SEO perspective – usually called a ‘Technical Audit’. With only a handful of days here, the focus was on:
- Domain handling
- Historical performance
- Performance of desktop vs mobile
- Site speed
- Page targeting
- Schema
- Image handling
- Existing redirects
Although some very quick wins were possible, and performance proved that, the audit revealed a much larger change would be much more beneficial in the long-term. This prompted the website redesign through early 2020, which allowed us to focus on mobile users (people in a hurry often use a mobile phone to find a solution) and how content was being structured.
Content Marketing
Alongside reviewing the technical foundations of Homecure, we also worked on an SEO Strategy. This involved reviewing 1.4k highly relevant keywords to reveal the opportunity at hand, if and where Homecure currently rank and where our efforts should be best placed.
The data allowed us to target key locations for the company, whilst expanding the service offering in-line with search demand and opportunity.
Separately, our strategy involved continuing to build on the site’s blog area – ensuring any and all content was closely tied to our key focus areas to create authority and improve rankings content quality signals.
Digital PR & Link Building
With little time in the plan initially for authority building, and whilst we were focusing on the sites technical foundation and content strategy, we had to get creative in how we generated external authority signals.
Our ‘content-less link building’ involved sourcing partnerships with known and non-competing brands in the household and home care industry. This allowed us to work with those brands to provide comments, e.g. ‘expert tips’, on their existing and well ranking content.
In 2020, and post redesign, we started to ramp up our digital PR efforts in order to start gaining higher authority external signals for the brand.
So, we did a survey…a rather tongue-in-cheek survey…looking at insights like ‘how often have you taken a business call in the bathroom’ or ‘the most popular things people do whilst on the toilet’.
Working with Homecure and building on their brand in the London market whilst utilising existing relationships with external expertise also allowed us to provide additional insight and commentary for the campaigns, giving them added value to journalists.
Results
- Through 2019, organic traffic grew 1,025%
- We followed this up with 911% organic growth through 2020
- Achieved 24 Link Root Domains (LRDs) from one survey campaign
- Built Homecure as an authority on related topics in industry publications
- Expanded core service offerings to first page rankings
- Homecure now reach more parts of London as a localised effort on targeted pages
- Improved from 38th in 2019 to 1st in 2021 for ‘emergency plumber’ and from 49th in 2019 to 1st in 2021 for ‘plumbing london’.
Testimonial
“As one of Root’s first clients, we’ve been absolutely delighted with the results, which has turned our SEO traffic into a sustainable source of leads. Not only is the technical knowledge and support there to help optimise our website but they come up with great ideas for digital PR campaigns too, and personally speaking, I’ve really enjoyed seeing our brand on national and sometimes international publications. It’s clearly worked over the years and we’re excited about continuing to do more with Root and continue growing our business.”
Lee Devlin
Managing Director, Homecureplumbers.co.uk