Hercules SEO Goals
The Co-owner of Hercules Tire Sales made it clear to Nozak Consulting that their goals were to:
- Improve their on-page & off-page SEO
- Become more visible online against incumbent Tire & Auto Repair competitors
- Increase online presence with social media, directories, back-links, content, and NAP Consistency in The Tulsa Metro.
- Be on page 1 SERP’s and have keyword/phrases in the top 3 Google & page 1 Bing SERP’s.
- Setup Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Adwords/Remarketing, Bing Webmaster tools, Tag Manager, and other scripts to help track, target, and re-target potential clients.
- Teach their Ops Manager how to market online, control their SEO presence and be more wise with money spent on potential scam SEO and web marketers.
Barbara Sicka, co-owner asked us to do a complete SEO, content makeover. Here is where we were and where they are now from the process.
Hercules Visibility & SEO Challenges
Hercules Tire Sales is a known business within the local community and nearly gets all of their business from word of mouth within the zip codes their stores are located in.
They were not showing up in the Google Map pack, and rarely showing up in organic searches.
Three other local tire shops had websites containing the entirely same content, nearly verbatim.
So instead of Google showing all three examples of the exact content, my client was getting left out of the SERP’s entirely.
Likely, Hercules was experiencing lower positioning, and no positioning at all, due to the changes unrolled in the 2011 Panda update.
Although duplicate content is a very hard penalty for the Bots to levy, it is more likely the bots wouldn’t want to list these websites with matching content back-to-back in their SERP’s, as that would lead to a less than valuable search result for their search client.
Having several of these identical content sites in the same city is fine if you’re the first search popping up on local queries.
That was not the case. In fact, their site was often not showing up for queries that these other identical sites would be dominating.
We made it priority to not only change the H1, & h2’s with location modifiers & better keywords, we additionally upgraded, reworded, and fattened the content on each service that Hercules provides. We also added optimized images and links.
No Backlinks Equals No Votes
When we started the project their back-links were a problem, they had 7 sites referring Link juice to their website; the day we finished the project 605 were pointing back to the website, in essence passing their vote of confidence to Hercules.
A day later the total was up to 605. Each day the total will climb as more and more sites find us, link to us, and give our site & content that vote of confidence.
Low Moz Local Score
When we started the directory clean up their Moz score was 36%, when we finished their SEO project, their Moz score was 87%. We cleaned up all 3 Tulsa Metro locations.
The score was actually being pulled down a few points by a paid listing on YP, so in truth the aggregators and tier 1 directories were extremely consistent with Hercules NAP, post project.
Power Listings Yext Propagating Inaccurate Information
While we cleaned up their directories we noticed a block of text that was inaccurate and about a different company in many of their tier 1, 2, & 3 directories.
We tracked that information down to their power listings account, fixed it, and instantly cleaned up hundreds of directories containing inaccurate information about their business.
We instantly saw our Domain Authority increase by 1.
After Directory Clean Up We Upgraded The Content
Content Management | Unique Content
In the beginning of this project, the entire site was an out of the box website from a tire shop website company that sells a CMS that is specific to the tire industry.
It is a beautiful and very functional and lightweight, pre-built theme.
So when they pull this website out of the box, it has the entirely same content as the next tire shop, using this company (besides updating a few things, phone numbers and localizing the H1s & H2s).
Outside of a few very minimal modifications, the content is the same content you will find by any tire company across the entire US using this out of box version of the website.
Content Pages Not Reaching Minimum Copy Benchmarks
Many of the service pages had little to no text on them. The first step was to get these low content pages over the minimum threshold and to bolster the larger pages and make them more authoritative.
We had our content writers create informative, fun, original content that would give Google a good amount of information to include in SERP’s.
H1s, H2s Titles, Links, Images
So we went through over 90 content pages and changed H1’s, H2’s, added content, changed the copy, added additional content, & more effect localized keywords/phrases.
Once we modified the content, we then added professional, optimized logo’d images to the content (title & alt text included).
While we modified the content, we added 2-5 additional inbound links/outbound links, per post, in order to help pass some additional authority to several of their pages that should be ranking.
The outbound links were to sister brands that are in the Hercules Network.
We finished by adding Meta Titles, Metal Descriptions, & Meta Keywords to all 90 service pages.
Hercules Organic Results & SEO Improvements
SEO Results
-We trained their Ops manager on directory cleanup, content management within their CMS, and back-linking
-We installed Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, Schema Markup, and several verification codes from sites requiring them for verification.
-Cleanup up Moz score, bad information coming from Yext Listings, claimed, modified, and completed hundreds of directories
-Cleaned Up/Created/Claimed Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Google Business, Yelp, Google Map, YP, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Alignable
-Modified, cleaned up, optimized content on 90 service pages. Added metas to all 90 and Title/alt text to images, and additional inbound and outbound links
-Aggressively claimed, submitted to, and hunted down vital, relevant back-links
-Submitted an editorial over Owner Barbara Sicka to Tire Review
-Added guest posting on additional local websites & news sources