Recently, we have been collaborating with Hilltop Plumbing to redesign their website, with the goal of getting more service calls.
Along with so many other plumbing and heating companies in town, the owner struggles to stay competitive.
Feeling frustrated, he came across with our article and was instantly impressed after reading what we have achieved for the optometry chain.
He decided to hire us and give his website and logo a brand new look.
Challenges That Hilltop Plumbing Faced
The company’s branding wasn’t in its best shape.
Hilltop’s service quality and skills were exceptional, but the logo and website did not reflect those qualities and lacked a modern, professional image.
The outdated branding and lack of attention in digital marketing brought in little traffic and almost no phone calls.
It was especially worrying when the company got most of its sales only through word of mouth and community referrals and no other sources.
Highlights of Our Strategy
Step 1: Rebranding
The primary objective of their new branding is to make Hilltop look experienced, trustworthy, credible, and powerful.
So we started off with the colours. Instead of the old 8 colour theme, we decided to only use 2 colours to give it a nice, clean touch to the logo because less is more and 8-color logo is so old, like a walkman, haha.
In addition, we redesigned their old “clip art” like duck mascot illustration to match the new colour theme. The new logo now includes a circular frame to represent the pipes that plumbers often deals with.
Last, but not least, the typography was changed to a similar, but more modern serif font to match with the rest of the design.
To emphasize their date of establishment, we used the font sans serif to showcase the company’s 40 years of history.
We also applied the same design concept to all of their trucks too!
Step 2. Website Upgrade
A website is the foundation of getting and converting traffic. To meet our client’s business goals, it was necessary to update it.
We came up with strategies such as sitemap reconstruction, mobile user experience upgrade, user interface redesign, and of course, search engine optimization.
Our client’s old website was designed a decade ago, so it wasn’t effective in capturing potential customers’ attention.
Old Website Design
With only 11 pages found on the website, it limited our client’s visibility on search engine result pages.
If you want to know why the number of pages matters to search engine visibility, you can read up another one of our blogs: 5 Things Your Web Agency Should Do Prior To Website Design Phase
The outdated design also dragged the conversion rate way down, which was worse for Hilltop, considering that they only had a few website visitors a day.
To fix this mess, we started off researching Hilltop’s top competitors’ website structures and their marketing patterns.
From many reports, we discovered that if we expand Hilltop’s website, we could improve the website’s search engine visibility immediately.
You can read up our observation in the same blog mentioned above: or click here.
WARNING！Don’t look at the photo below if you have Trypophobia! 😛
Hilltop Plumbing and Heating’s New Website Structure
We have expanded their website to a total of 343 pages.
This new website structure makes sure it has a page for every keyword that a potential client would use when they seek out plumbing service on search engine.
In this case, the keyword combination covers all the services they provide and all of the geographic areas that they provide service in:
Examples:
- Surrey furnace repair plumber
- White Rock air conditioner replacement
- Langley water closet replacement
- Delta house sewer repair
To make sure people are calling Hilltop after landing on their website, we redesigned the whole website following the new branding guidelines mentioned above. Oh yeah, this time, we optimized the website for mobile devices too!
New Website Design
Step 3. Branding PPC Campaign To Defend “Thieves”
Marketing strategies are going beyond than just giving discounts.
Now Hilltop’s competitors are playing tricks with search engine ranking to take away business.
Many competitors were running Pay-Per-Click branding campaigns using “Hilltop Plumbing” as the keyword and stole our client’s web traffic, a.k.a. potential customer.
Imagine when a lead searches “Hilltop Plumbing” on Google, but companies like Milani shows up before Hilltop Plumbing.
That person is more likely to compare prices between Milani and Hilltop.
This simple little marketing trick easily converted many of our client’s leads into their competitors’, since they were offered a special discount.
Here’s how the search result page looked like before we came in
We tackled this problem by creating multiple “above average” quality branding ads and made this “trick” financially injustifiable for Hilltop’s competitors to continue with this strategy.
An “above average” quality ad guarantees your website to show up as number one, but it requires you to be good at a couple things:
- 1. High Bidding Price – Same concept as an auction. The winner is always the one with the highest bid.
- 2. High Clickthrough Rate – This one is pretty much determined by Google.
- 3. High Ad Relevancy – The ad message should be consistent with the content on the webpage.
- 4. Good Landing Page Experience – A mobile responsive website with short loading time and has insightful content (a.k.a. page should be search engine optimized).
During the website development stage, we make sure your website scores “above average” in all of the criteria above
.
Hence, you can see we scored a 10/10 quality score for that keyword. To top it off, we placed a $36.00 bid on each keyword.
If Hilltop’s competitors were to continue their dirty tricks, they would have to outbid us at a much greater amount to outrank our ad.
Our guess is they would have to pay around $45 – $50 per click because there was no way for them to make their website more relevant than the Hilltop website itself.
Hence, all Hilltop’s competitors have given up on this tactic.
After Branding PPC Campaign Implementation
If you want to understand how the bidding mechanism works, watch this video by Google:
Results:
After implementing our customized strategy for Hilltop, by month 3 (April 2017), Hilltop’s website has already generated 140 new service calls in a month!
That’s not including any word of mouth referrals and walk-in customers.
Oh yeah! Their traffic is also growing at a 2X% rate every month (organically)!
Update 15 June 2017
Our strategy of expanding the page structures helped organic traffic grew even more in May. The more-than-expected new service calls allowed Dustin to get 3 new trucks for his company!
See what the owner texted us:
Our client’s visibility status has hit an all-time-high percentage over the past few months!
Key Focus Location: Surrey
Key Focus Location: Langley
Key Focus Location: White Rock
