Randy's Electric
Randy's Electric
Ensuring steady SEO performance and the smooth launch of a new website for a local, residential electrician
Overview
Randy’s Electric is the Twin Cities’ leading residential electrician with the strongest SEO performance of any of its competitors in its service area.
Randy’s Electric was seeking to better understand its existing SEO performance and any immediate quick wins that could be achieved while concurrently starting a website redesign project with another external design and development partner.
View Live Site >“Jackson was the best guy for our SEO. With deep experience and knowledge in home services, he was able to help us survive a new website launch and ensure we were still ranking correctly (and everything else that was over our heads)! He knows his stuff and knows how to set you up for success. Thanks, Jackson!”
Kaitlin Harvey, Marketing Coordinator
Optimizing low-performing location pages
After some initial auditing and keyword and competitive research to fully understand where Randy’s is winning and losing in search, we identified that there were some underperforming (service) location pages that needed to be reviewed and re-optimized. We started with location pages in cities where Randy’s best business comes from and systematically optimized each page.
Luckily, most of its location pages had already been ranking in positions 1-2 for “city name + electrician” and variations in this keyword group, so the work on lower performing pages had a greater chance to stick with a higher ranking after we resubmitted each page for crawling and indexing in Google Search Console.
Cleaning up technical debt and errors
Randy’s digital ecosystem is a complex mix of marketing and operations technologies which are all closely intertwined. As marketing leaders in the organization have changed over time, there remained several older tools and systems in place, such as 2 former website domains/URLs that were technically still accessible and indexed. At the start of this engagement, we uncovered lots of technical debt that was long overdue to be cleaned up. I identified, presented and helped Randy’s marketing, customer service and operations teams clean up these things to reduce the number of tools in use and reduce possible technical errors in search.
Ensuring a smooth and effective website launch
Most important to this engagement was the need to maintain existing SEO performance through a full website redesign project. Additionally, because of my experience in all things website strategy and production, I was able to collaborate and provide feedback to other members of the project team throughout the project.
As an advocate in all things SEO, I was responsible for keeping an eye on all phases of the project, including things like reviewing content for optimization, implementing title tags and meta descriptions, ensuring 301 redirects were implemented, submitting (new) sitemaps to Google and Microsoft for crawling and indexing post-launch, etc.
I also coordinated with other collaborators to ensure that paid advertising campaigns weren’t wasting money during the launch and that they were updated and optimized for the new website (landing pages).
Analytics, tracking and scripts
Lastly, and related to the technical debt noted above, Randy’s was seeking help in cleaning up and ensuring its analytics and tracking was set up for future measurement. While they were familiar with tools most commonly used in website analytics and tracking, they had only been using certain tools and lacked access to others where a previous employee or agency controlled access.
We recovered access to the tools that we could, though in the end my goal was to ensure their marketing team had direct and full ownership to critical tools like Google Tag Manager, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Business Profile, and more, so we set up new accounts as necessary.
Beyond access to many of the tools, I also configured and made sure each tool was set up correctly, including ensuring the GTM script was in the website code properly with the developer, implementing certain scripts to fire via GTM like GA and CallRail (call tracking), integrating third-party customer service and operations tools like ServiceTitan with forms and call tracking software, etc.