Struggling to Rank Locally? A Domain Change could be the answer

Many local small businesses struggle to rank locally for the important keywords for their services. Not showing up in search engines limits the visitors to their site and severely impacts their revenue and business growth. This can be doubly true for businesses not physically located in the area they service and the market they are trying to reach the most. Luckily, there's a solution.

The Problem

Recently, one of our clients reached out to us because their website was struggling to rank on Google for local "Houston" terms. Their business is located in Bellaire and while they we're ranking very well for searches containing "Bellaire", they we're buried in the back of the search results for all of their most important, traffic driving keywords.

Our Solution

After assessing the competition in the client's market, we were able to determine that the client's SEO strategy was on par with their competitors. The biggest differentiating factor was the client's physical business location, they are in Bellaire while their competition is located in the city. On top of this, their domain was Bellaire related as well (www.bellairebusiness.com).

Our solution was to rebrand the site as www.houstonbusiness.com and then work backwards to replace the SEO strategy already in place with the new domain. This involved setting up 301 redirects from all their old webpages to the new ones, updating their Google My business page to reflect their new domain accordingly, and updating links and citations pointing to the old domain with the new one. The process took about a month to complete and we're still working on fixing links that are pointing to the old domain.

The Results

About 6 weeks after completing the site overhaul, our first results came in and we were blown away. The important keywords we targeted are ranking in the local packs for "Houston". Additionally, those same targeted keywords are ranking organically on the first page. This means for a few terms the new site is actually on the front page twice.

Within approximately two months, we took a site that was struggling to rank for anything and put them on the front page for their most important keywords twice. Our client could not be more thrilled with the results and even claims we've doubled their business since they started working with us.

If you'd like to know more about Click and Create's services, please contact us for a free online marketing evaluation.