What other SEO strategies and tactics can be accomplished at this point?

[Ideas-Money-Art]

The client specializes in home, commercial and restoration cleaning services and offers carpet, upholstery, area rug, wood floor, drapery, tile and gout, stone and restoration services such as (water damage, fire damage, mold remediation). This company has over 40 franchises. Carpet cleaning service is their core service that gets them to the customer’s door, then technicians get to up sell on the secondary services (tile, upholstery, stone, wood…)

One of the main strategies we have implemented successfully is to be more visible at the local level was a local SEO strategy with every locations having their own unique landing pages for each of the services they would offer ( for instance the san diego location would a customized page for carpet, upholstery and all services they would offer). We have done a great job optimizing each of these locations. Optimization includes on page optimization, unique NAP information, local citations (manual insertions + Yext). We also added local markups and for some of the franchises we added review snippet. Link building around carpet cleaning has been conducted as well through guest posting and in links content. Most of our locations have a google business updated and optimized as well. We are working to get as many reviews as possible but it is still very challenging. In summary basic SEO tactics have been implemented following google’s guideline.

Traffic & rankings got us a positive progressive boost in mid 2013(April to August) but in april 2014 the site got hit by manual penalty affecting all carpet cleaning queries only. I was able to cleanup the mess within 2 months luckily but unfortunately we still saw a drop of %40 in traffic (vs 2013) on average in all carpet cleaning pages YoY (april to august).

2015 Q1 traffic has improved by 6% compared to Q1 2014 which is good but still not at the level we were. With the pigeon update and all the high authoritative directories (yelp, angieslist) taking over more and more of the organic real estate in the SERP and increase in competition we have had a hard time getting back to where we were (2013) and we may never get back unless another algorithmic change happens.

Another frustrating thing is local competition which has the worst sites as far as UX and content and still outranks us ( such as http://www.carpetcleaninglosangeles.com/). My main goal is to figure out a plan to increase traffic within the carpet cleaning pages and therefore increase conversions. Like it or not rankings for carpet cleaning queries is affecting our CC traffic, so working towards improving them is one way to go even though I shouldn’t focus all my efforts on just rankings.

2015 SEO main activities has been:
-local link building= somewhat successful (Seeing some rankings improvements but not consistent across all franchises)
-content marketing projects= quiet successful as far as traffic, branding and link acquisition but not seeing enough ROI
-new web design (launched late 2014)
-google business reviews
-local citations duplicate removal
-weekly blogging ( successful as far as traffic and branding)

Things I would like to work on:
-improve Bounce rate within site
-improve CTR by adding review snippets across all franchises
-add industry certification logos to build trust with users and improve conversion
-add before and after pictures of services performed
-site speed (has slowed down compared to the old site)

I would love get feedback on what other crucial components(that I am missing) can be done to improve most of these franchises rankings. I am a bit out of ideas as far as what else can be done.

Thanks!

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Thanks for your suggestions!

Our blog content is more informational than anything. I think we are pretty solid as far as kw selections for each of our services.

Digging deeper into the analytics is a good suggestions so we can understand where people are falling from the funnel. The truth is that we have some GA implementation issues lately so hopefully asap we will have access to this kind of data.

Our site is entirely mobile friendly

My coworker is a CRO specialist and is working on user testing but essentially focusing on testing the service scheduler. Are you suggesting that we need to also use A/B testing for service pages and blog as well?

Also do you know any tools or any methods to find "buzz" topics around carpet cleaning industry besides kw research, link analysis...?

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Thanks for your suggestions John.

We are pretty active on social as well by posting every blog posts we create on fb, twitter, and google plus. We are also promoting services via sponsored posts. We are not really conducting any promotions such as giveaways.

Our blog posts generates close to 10000 visits but still has a very high bounce rate close 90% . I think the topics are good but not amazing per se. Despite adding internal links on those posts, the bounce rate hasn't really decreased so maybe the way the blog is structured is affecting us as well (look, design, feel) .

[Fuel]

Hello there!

Definitely agree with John - social seems to be a huge area of opportunity for you guys. This could help with not only content distribution but also as another touch point and communication tool along the conversion journey.

And, is your content (blogs, specifically) more informational or does it have a certain "buzz" appeal? John had a great idea with the "10 Nastiest Things We Find On Your Carpet" idea. This type of content performs particularly well on social media (just look at buzzfeed!) by being easy to absorb and easily shareable.

This might be a tough question to answer honestly but considering past rankings from a purely user perspective - did you guys deserve those rankings? For example, if someone was to search "carpet cleaning companies in (location)" the user is clearly seeking a list of cleaning services in the area. Though that term might have a huge amount of search volume, an individual page for an individual location might not have been a good match for that search query in the first place, despite sales that might have resulted from that query. It might be worth evaluating your keyword list again and tweaking a few to ensure that you are a good match for exactly what is being searched. *I know nothing about your keywords or website, it was merely a suggestion

Digging deeper into the analytics and mapping out consumer paths to figure out where people are dropping off might be another good avenue to explore.

Also, have you considered user testing? Sites like usertesting.com are often relatively affordable considering the value of what you get in return and you might even get feedback on things you never even considered before.

Finally, you'll want to check and be sure all of your pages are as mobile friendly as possible and that you information is easy to find and navigate and that your forms are easy to fill out via different device types.

Best of luck!

[ClaytonJ]

I am just writing down thoughts as in many ways it is a open question.

The one component that seems to be absent is social media. Are the blogs being published on twitter, google + facebook etc.? Are the blogs posts topical, educational "the 10 nastiest things we find in your carpet?" etc.  Do the customers connect with the blogs.

Given the high bounce rate that means a lack of a strong connection with a customer...  a survey - just a simply one of what your customer is missing may uncover some gems - and a path to deepen that connection.

When all else fails ask the customer?  Do a site survey.

Site speed is an absolute killer - a study I saw a year ago (cant recall where) states every second over 2 second for page loading you drop 7% of customers.  That adds up. Also it is a significant ranking factor.

If I have one priority when I fix a site it is loading speed & usually a tidy up of title, H1's - H4's. Perhaps conduct a site audit - pretend looking at for the first time - be super critical.

So in summary - fix the loading page speed and do some customer research or ask your client to do a customer survey... also everything sounds a little bland.. you need to aim to twice as good as the best... are you doing that?