123 Remodeling

A Chicago design-build remodeling company with locations in three more states. They take on whole-space renovations, from kitchens and bathrooms to full homes, in high-end, high-quality materials.

The challenge and the solution

The challenge

Most of their SEO was already in good shape. Their map listings matched, their page content was strong, and their citations covered every directory that mattered. Rankings still swung up and down, because the backlink profile was nowhere near strong enough to hold them.

With little authority behind a site, you have to work much harder to rank for the searches you want, and a competitor can take your spot doing far less. Each region also runs on its own subdomain, and Google treats every subdomain as a separate site, so links pointed at the main domain don't help the others. Finding, vetting and negotiating links, and writing content for them, across four or five sites was more than their own team had time for.

The solution

We started with a backlink audit and cleanup. Links hurting their reputation were disavowed, which tells Google to ignore them, because one bad link does more harm than one good link does good.

Then each regional subdomain got its own budget and its own plan, built around that region. We added links at a steady rate so the growth looked natural to Google, raising both the number of links and the strength of the sites they came from. We also won them PR placements in major home remodeling and home improvement publications.

The rest of their SEO stayed as it was, so the gains came from the links.