Jay's Story
Jay Tucker of Swim World Pools knew something was wrong with his website.
Swim World's website wasn't producing the number of leads that it should for a company with his standing and reputation after 50 years in the Pool business.
Jay built this reputation one pool at a time...by serving his customers and completing pools on time, and on budget. In 2005, he was also selected as the preferred contractor for Extreme Makeover: Home Edition's TV show.
But his reputation as a leading pool builder wasn't translating into increased sales.
One day, Jay had had enough. He knew there was something wrong, but couldn't put his finger on it.
He was trying to update some pages after completing a high-end pool project that made the local news. The site was slow, and it kept crashing when he hit the save button.
Adding to his frustration, Google refused to show his page updates in search results.
Google SEO Audit
Jay reached out for an analysis of what could be improved and said, "Let's figure out exactly why my site isn't working right."
Step 1 was a Google SEO audit with a deep dive into his keyword densities (the number of keywords Google attached to his domain), and his traffic volume.
We captured snapshots of his traffic level as a baseline and compared them to the pool industry averages.
The SEO audit immediately uncovered a problem.
His robots.txt file, a basic, yet critical file, was blocking Google's crawler.
Jay was livid when he found out.
He's a fairly technical person, but his website was outsourced to a company that does nothing but customize websites and manages them for the pool industry.
Something as basic as blocking Google from indexing your website shouldn't happen...but we find these errors more often than we should.
The server hosting his website also had errors that slowed down page load times, frustrating new visitors to the point that they'd leave the homepage immediately.
The Decision to Renovate
Jay decided to completely re-build the website with a robust SEO infrastructure at the core. This time, he looked at it from the customer's point of view.
- What are the most frequent questions a customer has when visiting his store?
- What are they looking for 80% of the time?
- How can they get ahold of someone quickly and painlessly?
The content was created to deliver value, as quickly as possible, in a beautifully designed package to the end user.
The web developers scrambled off to create the new pages, while the technical SEO puzzle was snapped together guided by the audit.
Jay decided to make users happier by leasing a new high-caliber server to guarantee pages loaded quickly for desktop and mobile devices.
A new robots.txt file gave Google the power to index the important pages while keeping the spiders away from non-public links.
A sitemap.xml file made it easy for Google's crawlers to understand Swim World's site hierarchy and point them towards the site's foundational pages.
A few weeks after the new site launched, Jay noticed an improvement in the quality of leads requesting information from Swim World.
Users were educating themselves on the site and calling to request specific models of pools with custom accessories.
Google noticed the improvements and rewarded the site with more keywords and improved rankings which sent more traffic their way.
The Outcome
12 months after launching the new site, Jay's revenue was up 33%. If Jay had started the site renovation without an SEO blueprint as the guide, his results would not have been the same.
Today, Swim World Pools continues to lead as one of the best pool builders in Tennessee. New leads are consistent - even during seasonal fluctuations - and the website is now their most important marketing tool for new and existing customers.
If you're asking yourself the same question Jay did, "Why isn't my site ranking as well as it should?" an SEO audit will answer that question for you.
Find out what's included in an SEO audit and its cost on our Technical SEO Audit page.