Fencing Case Study

Buzz Custom Fence, specializes in residential fencing and gates in a variety of materials. The company also designs outdoor living areas, stone patios and kitchens. Buzz is headquartered in Fort Worth and is the recipient of multiple awards: Small Business of the Year, Top Private Company of Fort Worth and Texas Family Business of the Year.

Founded 30 years ago, Buzz has an extensive network of independent contractors serving the entire North Texas area.

The Problem:dfw metro

Since Google’s Pigeon update, rankings have shifted to benefit small businesses in specific neighborhoods and smaller markets. The DFW Metroplex is comprised of multiple smaller cities with Dallas, Fort Worth and Arlington as the largest in population size.

Buzz Custom Fence has a single office and showroom in Fort Worth with a positive online reputation. The company was looking to expand organic search traffic outside of Fort Worth and into surrounding cities in North Texas.

The Solution

Stage 1: Unique Service Content

Cleverly Engaged Marketing (CEM) began with installing NearbyNow, a reputation management platform. Buzz’s extensive team of contractors were trained to use the NearbyNow app for quotes, project descriptions and customer reviews.

In addition to software, service area content was expanded with case studies and bios of sales reps. Buzz Custom Fence now had unique content targeting multiple cities in Fort Worth.

Stage 2: Increase Local Visibility

When Buzz first came onboard, they had many citation management issues: offices shared phone numbers, multiple DBA’s caused inconsistent references online and more. The result was a fractured and small online brand presence.

Sales reps for Buzz lived all over North Texas and each managed a different service area in 15 different cities. CEM worked with reps to claim service locations, linking back to the newly created service area content.

Local chamber of commerce links and listings with fence/gate manufacturers were utilized to give authority to each service location. Service content was rewritten and expanded to a more conversational approach. Monthly content marketing targeted long tail search queries and improved the social presence.

Stage 3: Paid Lead Generation

For a contractor, there is no shortage of sites that claim to bring in leads, for a fee. Buzz Custom Fence was used to multi-year, expensive contracts with Yellow Pages and Angie’s List.

CEM negotiated short term contracts for newcomer lead generating sites: Porch, Houzz, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor, Amazon Home Services, Home Depot’s Pro Referral and The Blue Book. All lead generation sites were tested for conversion, employing call tracking and Google Analytics. After a few months, Buzz was receiving hundreds of leads at a lower cost per acquisition.

Results

CEM began working for Buzz Custom Fence a year ago in the summer of 2015. Since that time, organic traffic and revenue has drastically increased.

All Site Traffic

Figure 1: Visitors to the website increased by 27%, visitors stayed on the site in less time. This was primarily due to conversion optimization.

 all site traffic

Traffic Increase by Channel

Figure 2: Organic search increased by 46%, despite the local map pack changing from seven listings to three and ads moving to four positions in Google.

channel traffic

Traffic Increase by Organic Only

Figure 3: Shows a consistent increase 6 months into the project as traffic grew and stayed steady around March of 2016.

traffic-increase-organic-onlyPeak Season Comparison

Figure 4: The busiest time for fencing? Spring is when Buzz receives the most leads. Showing results for the peak season, organic traffic in 2016 was up 67% from 2015.

peak season comparison

Location Comparison

Figure 5: Looking at the top 8 locations by Geo in Google Analytics, reveals not only did organic traffic to the home office increase, but organic grew for cities throughout the Metroplex.

city comparisonright-city-comparison