The good thing with Jose is that he is always interested to experiment. He never says no to an idea, if he thinks that will help him outwit the competition. He shares plenty of SEO information gleaned from his locksmith sources helping us gain locksmith expertise along the way! We hope to continue our association with Jose for years to come.
Sometimes he drives us crazy too sending links from all the sources he can garner! Overall, it’s been wonderful working with him because he also keeps pushing us to try out new things and that is something we at DigitalBull GO enjoy.
SEO is about experimenting and trying out new things. Sometimes they work out, many times they don’t. It did though in this particular case.
That’s one thing with Jose. He is a risk-taker and always pushing us to experiment and do better.
When did we start working for the Client?
“Auto gets the most calls but commercial gets the most money.” – Jose on his locksmith business
We have been working with the client since the end of June for this project. The client has a locksmith store on W 51st St., Chicago, IL 60632 but generates a majority of his revenue by traveling to his customer sites performing car, residential and commercial locksmith services.
We had originally been involved only with getting higher Map rankings. Subsequently, a week after the case study ended, we started working on the Organic SEO side too.
So, our scope of work (at the time of the case study) was limited to optimizing the Google My Business listing and only the GMB Website URL Page, which was the homepage in this instance.
We also moderately updated a few other pages, but did not add a lot of content. So, you still find a lot of areas of the website that need to be improved. We will talk about this at the conclusion of the Case Study in the Way Forward.
We were about 2 months into the project tenure when this case study started.
So, what are the essential differences for us between a Map Pack Ranking project and an Organic SEO project?
In Map Pack, we focus on the GMB, elements of the website that impact the GMB ranking and off-page ranking factors like citations. Only a few pages of the website are ‘treated’ with our SEO medicine.
In any organic SEO, we broaden the scope of work to the entire website and focus on off-page activities like PR, link building, social signals, etc. Organic SEO projects are consequently priced higher. Sometimes they are also predicated on the difficulty factors, the keywords that the client wants to rank, the number of pages on the website, etc.
A subtle difference is whereas the focus in Map Pack ranking is on phone calls, the organic SEO relies more on getting more page/keywords into the top SERPs as a measure of success.
Back to the campaign and our case study.
Why this case and why now?
With suspensions rocking even genuine locksmith GMB listings during the turbulent months of June & July 2019, we were forced to look for less risky techniques in the GMB to increase proximity and relevancy signals.
Towards this, we looked at ‘safe’ options such as Google Posts. Within Google Posts, you can find less-used alternatives like Events and Offers.
When we first broached the client about trying out this original technique that we had come up with, he immediately gave his approval and suggested the Berwyn Car Show as a trial run.
Why Berwyn?
This area (ZIP Code 60402) was close to Omega Locksmith’s 60632 ZIP Code but hadn’t been doing well for him for reasons unknown. This also enabled us to find out if this approach would work with other nearby cities as well.
This was exactly the kind of opportunity we needed. The trial run turned out to be a full-fledged exercise and helped us to establish a presence in Berwyn, Illinois that Omega Locksmith lacked and also successfully validated our technique.