AT A GLANCE

+36% Regional Traffic Increase

+33% Calls

+130% Form Submissions / Estimate Requests

Problem

Mr. Chimney, a chimney cleaning, inspection, and repair company based in New York and Connecticut, had a dynamic legacy SEO location targeting setup from a former vendor that was still running and riddled with problems, but also potential.

We reviewed the historical site data in Google Search Console and Google Analytics and discovered that a small site with no more than 50 pages had hundreds of known-but-orphaned location pages by Google, and in conflicting URL combinations. At least 600 problematic versions of location pages were identified, targeting more than 100 locations. Most of these were known by Google, but were inconsistently and conflictingly indexed, as well as classified in various non-indexed categories. They also generated sparse clicks, but the impressions showed an underlying demand.

We also confirmed that the site did not enforce casing nor trailing/non-trailing slashes on the end of URLs, and that the conflicting combinations of location pages had self-referencing canonicals. To visually explain the issue, the following example URL combinations will load the same content, but to Google and servers, they’re considered unique URLs; this was how location-service pages manifested to Google.

  • domain.com/services/location-1/
  • domain.com/services/location-1
  • domain.com/Services/location-1/
  • domain.com/Services/Location-1

Solution

  • We corrected the underlying server-side issues, establishing rules and redirects that enforced lowercase casing with no trailing slashes. We also corrected the canonical link implementation.
  • We built a new dynamic setup and generated new baseline landing page templates with focused language and updated benefits and key differentiators, with the intent of further customizing the location variants with local reviews, location details, and other factors to differentiate them.
  • We initially submitted new batches of corrected URLs on a daily basis to test the waters and to give Google opportunities to recrawl, reprocess, and reclassify the prior problematic URLs.
  • We built a new location page sitemap, as well as a directory page (doubling as an HTML sitemap) to document the coverage area, as well as to provide a way for Google and other platforms to naturally discover the locations.

Results

  • Month 1: Mr. Chimney experienced top-of-search-results visibility, both in AI Overviews and the traditional search results, associated with known corrected location pages. Tracked calls spiked at least 43% over the previous year and were up 133% over the previous month. Form submissions are up 59% over the previous month. Traffic is up 110% over the prior month.
  • Month 2: Mr. Chimney has a month-over-month increase of 33% in tracked calls, 132% increase in form submissions, and a 36% increase in regional traffic.