The Client:
A family-owned residential painting and cabinet refinishing business.
The Challenges:
When I came onboard in June of 2021, I faced three primary challenges:
- At the time, the client relied on word-of-mouth to attract new customers. They had a brand new website and almost zero online presence.
- Time and labor-intensive jobs like exterior home painting accounted for the bulk of their sales. The client needed help growing the kitchen cabinet refinishing side of their business, which would mean quicker turnaround times and better ROI.
- Rather than investing in digital growth, the business was spending money on traditional marketing campaigns, which made it difficult to track their return-on-investment.
Because of these challenges, the client was losing customers to their competitors despite delivering a superior product to their local market.
My Strategy:
After assessing the client’s problems, I developed a custom strategy to build their website’s authority, drive qualified leads, and grow the cabinet refinishing service offering.
My approach boils down to three essential elements:
- Enhancing their new website
- Building informational content & local service pages
- Creating, optimizing, and maintaining their Google Business Profile
Each piece of this strategy built upon the other, driving a growth engine that now attracts new leads every single month.
1.) Enhancing Their New Website
The client’s newly-created site was generic and lacked proper navigation, hierarchy, and design. After enhancing these and other basic aspects of their website (title tags, meta descriptions, branding, etc.), I zeroed in on optimizations that would move the needle.
One example was their call-to-action (CTA) button in the top-level menu. Since it is part of their navigation bar and appears at the top of every page, it’s essential that it attracts attention.
To do this, I changed the color and messaging of this CTA – from a boring white “Contact Us” button to a bold blue “Get Free Estimate” button – to make it more appealing to potential customers.
By drawing attention to this button, we improved the user experience while driving customers to convert.
Here is a screenshot showing the improvement in organic conversions since implementing this change.
2.) Building Informational Content & Local Service Pages
Since cabinet refinishing is not a widely known service, we needed to find a way to inform and educate potential customers.
During the research phase I quickly discovered that their local competitors were not producing helpful content. This was a clear gap in the market that we could immediately fill.
By leveraging my client’s 20+ years of industry experience, I gathered information about their typical customer’s problems, pain points, and frequently asked questions. Then, using various SEO tools, I built a custom content roadmap and began producing high-quality, informative blog articles that answered customer’s pressing questions around kitchen remodeling and upgrading their cabinets.
At the same time, I built out unique local pages for each target location, beginning with their local territory and then expanding to their other service areas.
Next, I built internal links from the blog content to their local service pages. As our blog content began to rank on Page One of Google, this internal linking helped pass some of that authority to our local service pages.
This has resulted in consistent growth in keyword rankings, meaning we’re capturing more real estate in Google’s search results.
3.) Creating, Optimizing, and Maintaining Their Google Business Profile
You can’t dominate a local service area without building out a strong Google Business Profile. This is because Google’s map pack displays at the top of most searches with local intent (e.g. “cabinet refinishing near me”).
By optimizing the client’s Google Business Profile, and maintaining it through consistent posting, generating new customer reviews, and responding to customer inquiries, we’ve seen continued improvement in local map pack rankings every month.
The Results
As of today, my client’s kitchen sales have improved by more than +100% over the last year (from April 2022 to April 2023). And they anticipate continued improvement in revenue from cabinet refinishing services this year.
Cabinet refinishing has become their dominant service offering since starting our engagement, accounting for a large portion of their overall sales.
SEO is undoubtedly a long-term game, but the payoff is certainly worth the investment.
If you’d like to discuss a custom growth strategy for your business, get in touch with me.