02 The Baseline We Inherited
Before writing a strategy we audit what exists. What came back was not
one problem with a website. It was five, sitting in different systems,
and the reason they had gone unfixed for years is that each one was
holding the others back. Fix one and the other four keep failing.
Google did not know what the business was
A&A were running two competing Google Business Profiles: one
storefront, one service area business. The second was never needed. A
single listing can show a physical address and cover a service area at
the same time, which is how a yard serving a 50 mile radius should be
set up. Between them the two profiles split the reviews and the
ranking strength, so neither pulled its weight the way one whole
profile would have. Running two also breaks Google's rules, and when
they enforce that the listing comes down and everything on it goes.
Google had the main profile filed as a
Waste Management Service rather than a
Dumpster Rental, and carried no
business description at all.
That category error alone is enough to cap a business. Google uses the
primary category to decide which searches a listing is even eligible
for. A&A held second place for "dumpster rental" in New Bern on
the strength of proximity and reviews, while sitting outside the top
20 for "dumpster rental near me", which is how people actually search.
The web disagreed about where they were
Search engines confirm a business is real by cross-checking it against
third-party directory records. The industry calls these citations. Get
enough of them agreeing and the business becomes a known quantity.
We found 9 listings for A&A across the
directories search engines actually check, and only
2 of them were claimed, correct and
consistent. The rest carried 11 errors between
them in the name, address and phone data, including one major
aggregator that had the business in the wrong town entirely and
another with the wrong postcode.
So only 2 citations were of any use, against
24 for the top-ranked local
competitor. If the directories do not agree on your address, Google
cannot confirm you are where you say you are, so it stops showing you
to people in the next town over.
The website could not be found or fixed
A&A's site ran on the GoDaddy Airo website platform. That is the root of
this one. Airo hands you a set of templates and very little control
underneath them, so there is a ceiling on what the site can ever do.
What that looked like in practice: no pages at all for the towns
outside New Bern, and none for the services either. Everything they
rent was covered by a couple of lines on the homepage saying they do
it. Google ranks pages, not businesses, so with no page about dumpster
rental there was nothing for it to put in front of someone searching
for one.
The same page title repeated across
3 pages, and
21 of 36 images with no description
attached. Nothing handed Google the business details directly either,
so it was left to work them out from the homepage text. Google can
guess at that. It just does not rank a guess the way it ranks
something it is certain about.
Someone searching for a dumpster in Havelock, fifteen minutes down the
road, got nothing. With no page for a town, Google has no way to know
you serve it, so it falls back on distance. The further out someone
searched, the less likely A&A were to show up. Ads kept paying for
those clicks anyway, and every one landed on a general homepage with a
mobile speed score of 41 out of 100. A
contractor on a job site with one bar of signal does not wait for that
to load. He hits back and calls the next result, and A&A paid for
that click either way.
None of it was fixable on Airo. The platform will not let you build
the pages, control how fast they load, or give Google the details it
needs. So the site was replaced rather than patched.
The website itself was unmeasured
Nobody had ever put Google Analytics or Search Console on the site, so
we set both up from scratch. Google Ads was counting conversions from
calls placed on the ads, but nobody could see what visitors to the
site were doing: how many arrived, which towns they came from, what
they looked at before leaving, or whether a visit ever turned into a
call.
Tracking is not reporting for its own sake. It tells you which towns
are calling, which pages turn a visit into a quote request, and where
the ad budget is going to waste. Without it, every decision about the
site or the campaigns is a guess. Now they come from what people
actually did.
Paid media was paying for the gaps
Across the four months before we started, winning a single job through
the ads ate a meaningful share of what that job was worth.
Pull the account back further and it had not moved in over a year. The
monthly budget never changed once across thirteen months, and the cost
of a lead over that stretch was slightly worse than in the four months
we used as the baseline, so we were not picking an unusually bad
patch. Same
budget, same settings, month after month.
Nobody had run that account badly. They had run it without support.
Bidding on a town when your site has no page for that town is
expensive no matter how well the ads are built: you pay full price for
the click and then waste it.
Book Discovery Call
