I recently created a search engine optimized (SEO) WordPress blog with social media links for a Bend Oregon plumber, who is also the Mr. Rooter franchisee owner for the entire Central Oregon territory. The owner of the company came to me flustered with the fact that he had a web page within the well known Mr. Rooter corporate site, but it wasn’t visible in the search engines when people searched for a local plumber in Central Oregon. After some research, it became clear to me that we couldn’t do much with SEO for his franchisee page because the franchisee has no control over their site. But we could build a secondary site that would help drive traffic to his franchisee page.

Here is the strategy:

1. Build a hosted WordPress site that looks and feels like the corporate site but gives the client more control over their content including SEO.
2. The blog functionality would enable the client to update his site on a regular basis, making his site a source of information for commercial and residential plumbing issues.
3. The blog would link keywords back to his franchisee site to help make the franchisee site more visible
4. Use Google Analytics to view the traffic patterns.

He further expanded upon his online marketing efforts by  setting up a Facebook and Twitter account, where he can be seen by the population who rely on those sites as a source of information. The blog has backlinks to those social sites to help make them more visible to website visitors, and the social sites link over to the franchisee page, thus bringing more relevance to that page and ultimately, a higher ranking in the search engines.

The results within 30 days include:

1. The blog site gives us traffic reports so we can see a slight increase in traffic. The franchisee site’s results are specific to conversion and are measured with phone calls and online appointment requests.
2. The blog site ranks in the top 10 of the natural listings in Bing and Yahoo for select keywords, which ultimately brings traffic over to the franchisee site.
3. The franchisee site is now in the top 20 of the natural listings in Google for select keywords, thanks to relevant backlinks from the blog and social sites.

As with any good online marketing plan, the goal is to not lose this momentum but to build upon a solid base. The client will start to build backlinks and will continue to maintain their Central Oregon Plumber blog, Facebook, and Twitter sites to drive traffic to the Mr Rooter Central Oregon franchisee site, with the ultimate goal of increasing new appointment requests.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2011 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Search Engine Marketing, Social Media, Wordpress Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.