Small businesses face a pretty unique challenge.
Since they’re on the smaller side, they have fewer resources than their larger cohorts, but that doesn’t stop their industries from being fiercely competitive.
As a result, most struggle to gain online visibility – even if they have a successful brick-and-mortar business.
The good news?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a small business’s secret weapon when yielded correctly.
In this small business SEO case study, we’ll tell the story of how we grew a window tinting company’s website from obscurity into a major player in its local market.
The company is now a respected thought leader with a bustling blog (which has more than a few #1-ranked posts) and an authoritative backlink profile.
Here’s a sneak preview of the results achieved:
- A 241.689% increase in monthly organic traffic
- Over 100 keywords ranked in the top 10 (27 of which are top 3)
- Secured valuable link insertions to boost the domain’s authority and build brand awareness
The company is now generating a ton of business through its website, and our efforts are continuing to bear fruit for them.
Read on to learn how we did it (and how we can replicate these results for you)!
Why is SEO So Important for Small Businesses?
Before we get started, we must state the importance of SEO for small business owners in the modern era.
If you haven’t invested in SEO for your small business yet, you should know that you’re missing out on tons of revenue and brand recognition.
It’s no secret that the most popular way for customers to discover new businesses is through search engines like Google. They’re essentially the modern equivalent of the phonebook’s Yellow Pages, and customers’ reliance on them is only growing.
According to a 2023 study by BrightLocal, online local searches shot from 90% in 2019 to 98% in 2022, which is pretty insane.
This means that if your business doesn’t have visibility on search engines, you’re not connecting with a majority of your target audience.
Let that sink in for a moment.
If you’re sticking with old-school marketing tactics like flyers and TV commercials, 98% of your potential customers likely won’t even know that you exist.
Now that we’ve made it clear why SEO and small businesses should go hand-in-hand, let’s learn more about our client.
The Client: A Window Tinting Company with Over 30 Years of Experience
This client is a perfect example of a successful business that’s neglected its online presence (until now, of course).
Since they were going strong in their local area (they had been in business for 30 years), they didn’t see much need to focus on their website.
Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic brought some drastic changes to the way companies do business.
In particular, the quarantine made everything online more popular, including online shopping, video calls, and using search engines to find information about local businesses.
As illustrated by the BrightLocal study, searching for businesses online shot up by a whopping 8% between 2019 and 2022.
This reinforced the need for a robust online presence if small businesses wanted to stay afloat in the future.
In this case, the client needed a lot of help with:
- Optimizing their website (i.e., updating old content and recovering lost keyword rankings)
- Creating thought-leader-worthy blog content
- Generating consistent organic traffic
They came to us in August of 2023 with the hopes of improving their visibility on search engines like Google, and we were more than happy to oblige.
Launching a Star SEO's Campaign
After the initial consultation, the client and our team decided a Star SEO’s campaign was best, which is our managed SEO service.
Rather than ordering standalone products like Link Outreach or Web Copy, we knew that this website needed the full treatment with a cohesive SEO strategy.
Star SEO’s clients receive a dedicated campaign manager who determines which products are best for their current needs. The idea is to use the most appropriate combination of Star SEO’s products to meet pivotal goals, like increasing organic traffic, building backlinks, and improving keyword rankings.
This case study will cover a 10-month campaign for the client, which included the following products:
Let’s take a closer look at what went down.
Campaign Phase 1: The SEO Audit
Each month of the campaign also included several orders for Link Outreach and Link Insertions.
What’s the difference?
Link outreach is where we get in touch with other website owners, journalists, and bloggers in the client’s field. The goal is to land guest posts and brand mentions in order to build backlinks.
Backlinks are a major ranking factor on Google since they act as ‘credibility votes’ for your content.
The idea is this: if your website has other trusted websites linking to it, then your content must also be trustworthy, accurate, and high-quality.
Therefore, if you want to enjoy superb search rankings, you’ll need a strong backlink profile. This means generating links from authoritative websites, not just any site you come across.
Our link outreach experts reached out to major websites in the window tinting space, securing valuable guest posts, brand mentions, and shout-outs along the way (each with accompanying backlinks, of course).
Page-wise, we decided to focus on building links to the client’s service pages first. After they had a sufficient number of links, we moved to building backlinks for the blogs we created for the campaign.
Link insertions are where we reach out to site owners to request they place one of our client’s backlinks into their existing content.
This is unique because it doesn’t involve any content creation, such as writing a guest post.
Instead, the site owner adds one of your backlinks to a post they’ve already published (and that’s already in Google’s index, conveniently enough).
Link insertions are amazing because:
- They require less outreach (although some outreach is definitely still involved).
- They’re quicker to take effect since the content is already indexed.
- They have just as much power as any other type of backlink.
Campaign Phase 3: Link-Building
Once all the technical and user experience issues are squared away, we move on to looking for easy-win keyword opportunities for the client.
What are those?
Easy-win opportunities are keywords that the client’s site already ranks for, just not very high. The good news is that with some optimizations, it’s pretty easy to get these keywords ranking higher (sometimes even in the top 3).
The reason we go out of our way to look for easy-win keywords is they provide speedy results.
The Results: 241% Increase in Traffic, Dozens of Top-Ranking Keywords, Extremely Popular Blog Posts
After 10 months, the client’s SEO performance went through a complete 180.
Their traffic grew from 367 monthly visitors to 1,254 (and still growing), which is an increase of 241.689%.
They’re also ranking in the top 10 for over 100 crucial industry keywords, many of which are in the top 3.
Also, the blogs we wrote for the client are still killing it by bringing in the lion’s share of their monthly traffic. Since they’re all equipped with CTAs, they link out to crucial service pages – giving our client the chance to convert readers into customers.
All our link-building efforts paid off, as we were able to add significantly to the website’s backlink profile and referring domains.
The backlinks are also a major reason why the client’s content is ranking so well on the SERPs (search engine results pages) right now.
All in all, it was a highly successful campaign that helped take the client’s business to the next level, especially in terms of online presence.
Wrapping Up: Small Business SEO Case Study
That concludes the story of how we completely transformed our client’s website for the better. They now enjoy tons of organic traffic, backlinks from reputable websites, and expert-level content written to convert. What’s not to love?
Want to recreate these results for your small business?
Then it’s time to sign up for a Star SEO’s campaign of your own! Don’t wait to let us simplify your SEO success.
