Cleaning equipment companies face a unique challenge when it comes to SEO
For one, their business is typically local, so they must apply the tenets of local SEO, which is its own ball game in many regards.
Here are just a few ways local SEO differs from traditional SEO:
- A focus on local keywords (containing phrases like ‘near me’)
- The need for an optimized Google Business Profile
- Getting listed in relevant local directories
- Targeting local news outlets for backlinks
Piled on top of that, most cleaning equipment companies are also B2B (business-to-business), meaning their customer base consists strictly of other businesses.
Therefore, the principles of B2B SEO also apply, which include:
- A lengthy sales cycle requiring lots of nurturing through content
- Appealing to decision-makers at companies instead of general consumers
- Heavy use of LinkedIn to interact with prospects and post content (LinkedIn is the #1 B2B marketing channel)
Put it all together and you have B2B local SEO, which is certainly a mouthful.
Yet, mastering B2B local SEO is extremely important for cleaning equipment companies, especially if they want to survive in today’s competitive landscape.
This is more than most cleaning equipment companies can muster since they’re already extremely busy managing products, parts, services, and rentals. That’s why they turn to SEO agencies like ours to improve their visibility on search engines.
Stay tuned to learn how we achieved a 327% traffic boost in just 6 months for a cleaning equipment company’s website and got them ranking for 1.6k relevant keywords.
The Client: A Trusted Floor Scrubber Dealer in California
This time, our client is a highly experienced cleaning equipment dealer specializing in floor scrubbers, but they also offer pressure washers, utility vehicles, and street sweepers, just to name a few.
They’ve been in the business for more than 40 years, and they currently have thriving locations in California, Nevada, and Arizona.
The problem?
While they were steady business through other channels, their online presence was completely stagnant. In fact, their website failed to generate much traffic at all since its inception.
Most importantly, they weren’t ranking well for local keywords related to their business, which wasn’t good. That meant all the traffic generated by users searching for those keywords was going to their competitors.
Leaving money on the table is never a good thing, so they knew they had to improve their SEO to change that.
This client is actually a subsidiary of one of our other clients, so they already knew about us.
Since we drastically improved the SEO for their holding company, they reached out to us for a free consultation.
One of our team members chatted with them about the best way to remedy their underwhelming performance on Google.
After some discussion, we determined the best course of action was to sign them up for a Star SEO campaign, our fully managed SEO service.
Unlike our standalone SEO products for services like link-building and content creation, Star SEO is a comprehensive, all-in-one solution where we assign clients a dedicated campaign manager. From there, the manager determines the best combination of our SEO products to use to achieve our client’s goals.
In this particular case, the client’s goals were as follows:
- Start generating more traffic to their website, particularly their product pages
- Improve their site’s authority to make outranking competitors possible
- Start ranking for relevant local keywords to drive business through their website
Once the agreement was made, we got to work on an SEO audit.
The SEO Audit: Looking for Easy Wins
Every Star SEO client receives a thorough SEO audit at the beginning of their campaign. This serves two purposes:
- We identify and resolve any pressing issues affecting their SEO
- It gives us a chance to look for easy-win opportunities
First, there are numerous on-page and technical factors that can inhibit a website’s performance on search engines.
These include:
- Targeting irrelevant keywords
- Missing metadata (title tags and meta descriptions)
- Duplicate content (two identical pages trying to rank for the same keyword)
- Broken links
- Thin content (web pages containing less than 700 words)
- Noindex tags blocking important pages
Once all the technical tweaks are made (if we need to make any), we move on to looking for easy-win opportunities.
What are those?
An easy-win opportunity is a keyword that the website already ranks for but not in the top 3. Since the #1 result gets most of the clicks (followed by spots 2 and 3), keywords that aren’t ranked in the top 3 don’t generate much traffic.
However, it’s pretty easy to get keywords already ranked in positions 4 – 30 ranking in the top 3 within a few months. All we have to do is optimize the pages containing the keywords to give them a boost.
In this client’s case, they had lots of easy-win opportunities with keywords related to cleaning equipment in the areas they serve.
We optimized the pages by building backlinks, adding keywords to the right spots, and increasing the word count (with valuable insights) of thin content.
The Strategy: Building Backlinks to Collection Pages
Once we analyzed the client’s domain authority, we realized their primary issue. They were getting outranked by competitors because they didn’t have enough high-quality backlinks.
Backlinks (links on external sites pointing back to yours) are how Google builds trust with websites, and they only rank websites in the top 3 that they trust.
The idea is that if a reputable website links back to your content, it’s a sign that you’re also trustworthy. You can think of it as ‘trust by association.’
Our goal was to build backlinks pointing to our client’s site from authoritative sites in the cleaning equipment industry, and we were very successful.
Techniques we employed included:
- Link insertions. We found instances on existing web pages where mentioning our client’s cleaning equipment products added value. With some outreach wizardry, we secured TONS of valuable brand mentions from trusted domains.
- Guest posting. Besides link insertions, we also reached out to site owners in the local cleaning equipment industry to write guest posts. Our writers produced high-quality, engaging posts containing high-resolution images to A) secure backlinks and B) generate referral traffic.
The Results: Ranking for 1.6k Keywords, Giant Boost to Organic Traffic (327% Increase)
Thanks to the easy-win opportunities we targeted, it didn’t take long for the traffic to start rolling in, and the results were drastic!
Take a look at this GIANT spike in traffic:
They grew from total obscurity to knocking it out of the park, and it was basically overnight.
Also, here’s a look at their backlinks and organic traffic:
They’re now ranking for over 1,000 relevant keywords, and they’re generating $574 worth of traffic on a consistent basis.
Want to achieve similar results for your cleaning equipment company?
Star SEO is the solution to your SEO woes, and we’ll take the process completely off your hands, so don’t wait to get in touch.
