One truck, one plumber. Together, they can support a budding community, save hundreds of thousands for local homeowners, and offer much-needed relief during the most exhausting plumbing emergencies.
But what if you could turn that one truck and plumbing professional into one additional vehicle and plumber every year?
Sunset West Plumbing & Rooter (SWPR) of Los Angeles does just that!
Four years ago, SWPR’s Jimmy Papik approached our plumbing SEO company with enthusiastically high hopes for his business. As with many forward-thinking plumber services, Jimmy had the drive and willingness to grow his business online but lacked the professional expertise and experience.
When the Plumbing Webmasters took on SWPR as a client in 2016, we faced a few familiar challenges.
However, with careful planning, professional work from our team, and very dedicated investment from the folks at Sunset West Plumbing & Rooter, we managed to produce some outstanding long-term growth for the company’s revenue stream and brand!
Table of Contents
Challenges for Sunset West
Los Angeles. As one of the most populated cities in the US, the City of Angels can be a real struggle to compete in, let alone earn top placements. Given the scope of the project and the nature of organic search engine optimization, we knew that growing a mature channel of plumbing leads could take years.
Our team needed to develop an exceptionally high-performance optimization strategy to crack the competition’s hold on top search results. Of course, that strategy would need a user-friendly website to springboard off of, plus local citations.
Sunset West Plumbing & Rooter had little online tenure (despite the company’s real-world experience), which meant our SEO work was starting from scratch. So we got to work!
Our Digital Marketing Strategy
There are no worthwhile shortcuts when it comes to organic SEO, especially if you crave sustainable growth. There’s no secret switch to make Google rank up your brand. With that being said, top local listings are typically driven by website optimization.
That’s where we started with Sunset West Plumbing & Rooter.
Initial Site Architecture
The best-performing websites focus on extreme practicality, user-friendliness, and value. In other words, they try to provide informative (helpful) content in a way that’s easy for visitors to digest. So we kept things refreshingly simple with Jimmy’s website.
Site architecture naturally started with the homepage and then spread out to top-level service category pages.
- Residential Plumbing
- Plumbing Repair
- Preventative Maintenance
Each top-level category housed a slew of specialized service pages beneath them, making it easier for people to search by category for their required solution.
To drive more calls, we ensured that every page contained clear calls to action at the top, midsection, and bottom. This makes it remarkably easier for people to locate the company’s phone number no matter what device they use.
Thankfully, Sunset West had plenty of original photographs for us to infuse into the site.
Google (and visitors) can easily tell unique, original photos from stock images, and they reward them with a little more SEO “juice” when the time comes to determine rankings.
We made sure to optimize these with captions, titles, and alt text for the visually challenged. Even these seemingly minor details can make a difference on an aggregate site scale.
Value-Driving Content Strategy
Before moving on to more keyword details, it’s worth noting that we took considerable time to produce helpful, informative pages for incoming visitors.
As homeowners and renters ourselves, we know just how much of a difference a well-written website can make when trying to find solutions for life’s most aggravating problems.
So our content-writing team focused on communicating with an encouraging, empathetic, and authoritative voice.
As you’ll see in the Analytics section later on, this produced a fantastic average visit time (an important performance metric for many service companies). More importantly, it encouraged more homeowners and commercial prospects to call Jimmy and his team.
Every page received its own unique content and keyword optimization strategy, producing a broader variety of terms for the plumbing company to rank for.
This diversified content approach is essential for plumbers new to the online marketing community. Why? Because they deliver short-term results while long-term branding steadily gains ground.
We all know the top industry keywords that capture the most search volume. These competitive phrases are the hardest to rank at national or metropolitan levels. While we embedded these within the site, we also pursued a very large number of secondary keywords.
Think of these as the longer related phrases and synonyms, plus location-based terms. These are much easier to rank for. Despite the low search volume attached to each individual phrase, their cumulative volume allows Sunset West to draw in steady streams of leads for healthy, short-term growth.
Local Optimization Activities
So many plumbers unwittingly stumble into a much larger pool of competition than they need to. That’s because plumbers don’t realize what it takes to optimize on a local level.
There are a number of tools within the Sunset West website that we designed to capture rankings in local searches. For instance, we optimized each page with city/state long-tail keywords to connect the site to the Los Angeles community better.
We also embedded our review software in the website to give Jimmy’s team check-in and automatic review request functionality.
The geotagging feature allows prospective clients and Google to see real-world activity: what sort of services Sunset West is providing and even the specific communities where the services take place. That’s local SEO gold!
Our team also managed the optimization of SWPR’s Google My Business profile. This listing provides Google and customers with key location and service information about your company.
It’s a foundation element of local SEO, making it extremely difficult to appear locally if you don’t have it claimed and verified correctly. If you aren’t familiar with Google My Business, make sure you check out our page on the listing tool!
Client Involvement: The Clincher
We’ve worked with hundreds of businesses over the years. It’s worth noting Jimmy’s team’s exceptional dedication, involvement, and eagerness.
They made continued efforts to monitor their online presence, ask questions, seek out new opportunities, and adapt over the years. Jimmy’s team wholeheartedly worked to utilize their website and other online assets effectively.
Their results speak for themselves!
Our Project Results
This client ranks #1 in the Google Map 3-Pack for various high-value queries.
This client earns nearly half of all traffic from organic search.
Sunset West Has a Very Healthy Balance of Organic and Direct Traffic.
Sunset West Continues to Develop Its Brand and Earn Stellar Reviews!
Final Thoughts
In 2017, 47% of SWPR’s traffic came from organic search, 27% from direct, and the rest from social media and referral solutions. Today, 48% comes from organic, and 40% comes from direct search.
In other words, Sunset West Plumbing & Rooter has an extremely healthy balance of new and returning customers coming to their website!
Their online brand is flourishing just as much as their physical team is. It’s years of steady growth like these that are worth fighting for!
His company continues to thrive thanks to Jimmy Papik’s dedication to online marketing and providing exceptional service. And that makes our team at Plumbing Webmasters very happy.
