Dump-Squad
This is a quick case study of what we were able to do for construction equipment rental business operating across Toronto and the GTA. Yes….we are very proud of what we accomplished!
Dump-Squad Case Study
Dump Squad offers Reliable Disposal Bin Rental, Garbage Bin Rental Toronto, Mini Bin Rentals and Dumpster Rentals in Toronto and the GTA. They have been in business from around 2016? (We think). We digress. From what we can see, they have done an excellent job with their product and made the most of our marketing efforts for them.
We try really hard to rank you and get you to the top. Google rankings are personal to us
Below is a list of services they wanted ranked on google and hired us to do so:
Garbage Bin Rental
They Offer Garbage Bin Rental Services across Toronto and the GTA in Canada.
Mini Bin Rental
They Offer Mini Bin Rental Services across Toronto and the GTA in Canada.
Junk Removal
They Offer Junk Removal Services across Toronto and the GTA in Canada.
Dump-Squad today is certainly not the company they are today as is the case with any progressive and successful company. When we were contacted for the initial consultation, dump-squad had an outdated website and were in desperate need of a digital overhaul. We asked them a lot of questions in order to build them the SEO campaign they deserve.
This is where they currently stand. You will be seeing this picture over and over again. As you read through the case study, the picture will make more and more sense (we promise).
Website Design
When it comes to websites and SEO campaign, one cannot exist without the other. All SEO Agencies depend on a perfectly crafted website in order rank clients for their respective keywords. It is crucial to have an updated and improved website design before the start of an SEO Campaign.
Speed…Always Saves.
One of the most overlooked aspects of website design: speed. In our time, patience really is a commodity. As a rule of thumb, pages that load longer than 3 sec often lose 20% of their potential client base.
Robot.txt is a file on your website that usually gives our special instructions to search engine (google/yahoo/bing) about that particular website. Sometimes (unknowingly), SEO’s and freelancers often forget to edit the code that might hinder your SEO progress.
Content is King.
Ranking for keywords is cool. However…does your website even contain the keywords that you are looking to rank for? How many times? Hopefully you didn’t keyword stuff the site too hard..2.5% is usually the magic number for optimal results.
Overall Branding and Design
USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition. What makes your different from your competition? There has to be that one factor that separates you from the competitor next search result.
Trust is Everything.
How established is the business? At the time, Dump-Squad had around 24 reviews? It’s not bad for that industry at that time. good. You want to have a few reviews to prove to your potential customer that you exist and are doing well.
What does a quick google search on your business bring up? Does your website even show up? For Dump-Squad, the website showed up, local business listings and map listings all showed up. (if not we build it. Don’t worry)
Google Listings are an underrated asset.
Do you have google listings for maps? Local SEO if often one of the most overlooked aspects of SEO. Several business owners underestimate the power of maps…we take all the help we can get to rank your business.
Backlinks
Did you hire a previous SEO company? No problem. If you are looking for a new one, chances are we have a mess on our hands to clean up. Luckily, Dump-Squad was a clean slate and we could work freely.
Black Hat SEO…Never.
When new clients come to us, one of the first things we check for is the google penalty. There are times when all the work will not pay off due to a simple google penalty. Check first. Get rid of it if there was one. Proceed as usual.
How many backlinks do you have? No it is not a competition and the more is not the merrier. Quality/Quantity. One link from Forbes.com is more valuable than 100,000 backlinks from some freelancer on Fiverr.
If you do have backlinks in the thousands or hundreds even, who is maintaining your campaign? Dump-Squad overall was in a good situation since they were new and hired us right from the get go.
Step 2: Where are your competitors?
As is the case with all industries, competition is key to ranking for your keywords. What is it they are doing that we need to do? How are they doing it? How much are they spending monthly?
We ask all the questions to try and build an SEO campaign that is sustainable long term. Here are some of the images of their competitors today. Obviously they have made adjustments to their campaigns but we are going to be using where they were around January 2017 for a fair comparison.
Note: We blurred out their names because we are not trying to tick them off. Just showcasing what we have done for our client: Dump-Squad.
Industry Strength
All the competitors have updated websites that state of the art. Nobody in the industry is using outdated techniques or websites to rank for their keywords. That means that dump-squad needs to have a updated, functional website that can get the job done.
Speed Saves.
All their websites clearly were functioning fast enough to rank at the top. It is not coincidence that speed usually correlates to higher rankings and increased customer acquisition rates.
The Robot.txt is something we cannot access for these website but clearly their SEO Agencies have been taking care of it. All the correct instructions have been placed on there.
All their websites are well optimized. Ranking for keywords is cool. However…does your website even contain the keywords that you are looking to rank for? How many times? Hopefully you didn’t keyword stuff the site too hard..2.5% is usually the magic number for optimal results.
Backlinks
As you can see from the images above, we are going up against a variety of websites with varying link profiles. All of them have really good backlinks in general and we had our work cut out for us.
Every Single competitor mentioned above had established reviews on their business. Getting customers for a business that is unproven is obviously a harder task. However, we have ways to increase your business reviews on Google.
Google is King.
A quick Google Search brings up all of their businesses. There are no mistakes or errors on those pages either. Everything looks good.
Plenty of google listings. Lots of reviews. Businesses in the industry have been around for a long time and we have to exceed expectations just to break into the industry.
Budget
Every single company in the industry looks like they are hiring someone for their SEO. How did we know? The quality of the backlinks, page speed, optimization and several other factors give it away.
Penalties Suck..
The google penalty risk for this industry seems low. There are a lot of companies that doing SEO the right way. Cheap tactics would not get the job done here (Not that we apply those). We always want to know what we are up against.
Awesome mix of Backlinks. They are all over the place. The more diverse they are, the more work we have to do .
Well Maintained. Super Optimized. All the companies had SEO agencies maintaining their campaigns for them.
Step 3: How good is your Website?
Based on the research and information we had on hand, Dump-Squad needed help on multiple fronts. At the time, their website was old, outdated and definitely needed an overhaul.
On top of the website overhaul, the SEO Campaign had to be built from scratch as there were no current backlinks and Google did not trust the website very much.
New Website Design
Websites are your Backbone.
As you can see, we made a very responsive website that is still currently servicing them well. When it comes to “Trades and Service” Business(es), you want customers to see what they will be receiving. You may think little factors like this are trivial. However, they can be the difference between a successful campaign and an unsuccessful one.
Strong Branding and CTA’s
Strong Branding is Key.
Orange is the color they choose when it came to their equipment. We followed. We tried to make the orange as prevalent as possible along with a contrast color of light blue to make the website eye-popping. The last thing you want is a dull and boring color scheme that subliminally turns the clients interest off. Adding a custom made video was a nice touch and some people like to watch instead of read.
Backlinks Structure
We love situations like this. It was a blank slate with very few to no existing backlinks. It gives us a chance to build a campaign that will be successful for sure without having to correct previous companies mistakes. We built them a blog page with the content to add more credibility in the eyes of Google.
Step 4: How do we do it? What’s the plan?
At the moment, we have all the information we need to start building up our plan. We know the clients background. The scouting of the competition is complete. Lastly, we also have a a functional yet modern website that can be ranked at the top of google for this industry. What now? Time to build a plan an execute it.
Website Metrics
In the early 2000’s, many companies and SEO Agencies were able to simply keyword stuff their way to the top. If you were in the business of Tree cutting, you simply had to mention tree cutting as many times as possible. The end.
Today? No chance. If anything, you will be penalized by google and your rankings will not only decrease but your domain can get de-listed. We had to make sure the targeted keywords were sprinkled in without overdoing it.
Speed Saves.
One of the most overlooked aspects of SEO – Website Speed. The more time it takes your webpages to load, the more customers you lose. Imagine you were trying to buy a bin from Dump-Squad. However, their page wont load for 5-10 seconds. What would you do? Leave.
We ensure that speed is always functional and solid.
SEO Marketing
Readability is a metric considered by google. What does it mean? It signals the search engine about the content and how it sounds. Content is meant for the end consumer. Not to rank on google. You want it to sound as natural as possible when it comes to ranking at the top. The more un-natural it sounds, the longer you spend at the bottom of the pages.
Layout is Key.
How is the website designed? How many call to actions are there? Are you actively asking your client to give you a call? email? Attracting people thorough your website is great. However, the end goal is convert them into customers. We made sure the website was filled with plenty of Call-to Actions.
Backlinks
At the time of the campaign, Dump-Squad did not have any backlinks that were powerful. Sure, they had their profile listed in a few directories but that is not going to cut it. It was important to remember to grow in spurts.
Always Trend Up.
Grow in spurts? What do you mean? Just add 1,000 backlinks right now. The faster the better right?
Wrong.
You want to be able to add backlinks on a consistent basis in order to rank at the top AND stay at the top. Patience is one the key qualities when it comes an SEO Agency. No spam. No filler. Just consistent link building activity.
Step 5: Plan Execution. Phase # 1
SEO is nothing something we can be 100% correct on all the time. It is all about trial and error. What works for a certain company will not work for another. We can put together the best possible plan given a certain situation. However, it will make progress but tweaks will be needed to take the next step and end up on top of your rankings.
Hence…
Phase # 1 of our marketing plan for Dump-Squad. This is usually the first phase of many and it sets the tone for future growth. Perhaps the most crucial part of your ongoing campaign. Often times, many start-up companies choose to cut corners and hire someone that is cheaper. They end getting a lot of “black hat” backlinks that will rank you initially but will penalize you down the road. Then companies like our have clean up the entire mess and start all over again.
Initial Burst of Traffic
When it comes to websites and SEO campaign, one cannot exist without the other. All SEO Agencies depend on a perfectly crafted website in order rank clients for their respective keywords. It is crucial to have an updated and improved website design before the start of an SEO Campaign.
Exponential Growth
if you are shopping for SEO Services, we are positive that you have seen agencies make outlandish claims like this. What does it really mean?
In short. You are track to rank at the top of google. At Sages Marketing, we take honestly and transparency very seriously. It is always in your best interest to hire an SEO Agency that doesn’t try to fool you with these outlandish claims but rather work on improving your search results.
Return on Investment
SEO is an investment for your business. It is a form of marketing that tends to pay itself over and over again. It’s only growing in importance by the day thanks to the digital world we live in today. In dump-squad’s case, they began seeing around 500 clients within their first 6 months!
They were already in the green. Don’t understand it? No problem. Click on “Math Time”.
Money Talks..
If you see the picture above, it tells the amount of traffic your website is attracting and gives you a numerical value based on how much google values it at.
In our case, Dump-Squad is valued at $5,100/Monthly. It attract 1,100 Visitors.
$5,100/1,100 = $4.64
So in first six months, Dump-Squad began attracting 500 clients.
500 x $4.64 = $2,318.18
They pay us around $2000/monthly.
In the first 6 months, Dump-Squad was already making money of their own SEO campaign not to mention their actual business.
SEO is all about Return on Investment.
Backlinks
There are bad apples in every industry. SEO is not an exception. More often than not, SEO companies try to prove their worth by talking about return on investment. However, their return is not exactly what you are looking for or need. It is important to get your ROI through Keywords that generate you revenue.
Numbers Don’t Lie.
In the case of Dump-Squad, we could have easily ranked them for a bunch of keywords that are easy to rank for and told them that they are making money. Do we even think about doing this like other SEO companies will? Absolutely not.
Look at the image above. Under countries, you will see Canada accounting for 99.5% of their traffic. We ranked them for local searches where local people would give them a call for a dumpster.
Not rank them in Idaho, Ohio or Montana…..useless traffic.
Relevant Traffic is key.
Step 6: Review the Progress. Make changes if Needed..
Dump-Squad was making steady progress as we can see from the pictures above. Within 6 months, they were starting to break even and better yet, save money on their marketing. Their traffic kept increasing and their valuation kept getting higher and higher. At one point, they were getting as many as 2,200 clients at their peak ($10,000 value)
However, recently (Earlier) this year, we noticed a steep decline in traffic. Clearly the strategy we were using is no longer working and changes needed to be made.
Spoiler: we figured it out.
Back to the Basics
Optimize the Website
We notices several of their competitors had hired rival agencies to copy and beat them out. This is only natural. We did the same thing for them and its only natural for them to reverse the trend.
We ended up making changes to the websites and layout including and not limited to layout, speed, content, meta tags and several other factors.
Dump-Squad was not exactly struggling but it was time to re-tool (just like the Raptors should) and build it back up.
What are they doing?
Honesty is the best policy.
Lets be frank here. We did not see this coming. It happens. It happens to every professional in every industry. So how do we recover?
Let’s see what the competition is doing.
Simply put:
1) Majority of them builtbrand new websites
2) They added a lot more content than Dump-Squad had
3) They have indexed more pages and posts than Dump-Squad did.
4) They caught up in terms of adding backlinks.
Time to react and respond. Do what we can to put our client at the top.
FYI: At no point has Dump-Squad ever lost money from their SEO campaign. Their low point of 650 cleints is still valued at $3,000…
Just Saying. When we build campaigns, we built them with a strong foundation. It done so to give us more time to recover and respond.
On and Off Page SEO
The new and re-tooled SEO campaigns were stronger than ever. We had to build a lot more high quality backlinks to stand a chance and bring them back up. SEO is all about Up’s and Downs. As long as your campaign is paying itself off and making you money. You should keep investing into it.
Step 7: Re-Tool. Re-Grow. Maintain Rankings.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. The results below are put on display to show you what can be accomplished for your business as well. We promised you that this picture would make sense at the end. If you have stuck through the entire case study, thank you for taking the time to read it.
Hopefully it makes sense and you are ready to give us a call for your business!
The Final Breakdown: Spend Vs Earned
Spent
As we previously mentioned: SEO Services are all about Return on Investment (ROI). Dump-Squad has currently been with us for the last 3 years (and counting). Here is the breakdown of the total price they have been billed for:
Initial Payment/Setup Fee: $0
Web Design and Development: $2000
Monthly Payment: $2000/Monthly
Time Span (as of right now): 36 months
Total: $2000 * 36 Months = $72,000
+$2000 (Web Design) = $74,000
Earned
They paid $74,000 over 3 years??? What? That’s a lot of money. Yes. We Agree. However, we also need to account for what they received back in terms of production. Its obvious they made their money. Exactly how much?
First Year Average traffic: 700/Monthly
Second Year Average Traffic: 1500/Monthly
Third Year Average traffic: 1100/Monthly
(700*12) + (1500*12) + (1100*12) = 39,600 Visitors
Average Click Value: $4.64
Total: 39,600 * 4.64 =$183,744
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