Blog Optimization

Background:
Locally owned and operated since 1986, Overhead Door Company of Wilmington™ is one of 450 authorized Ribbon Distributors in a nationwide network at the core of one of the most-recognized and respected brands in the garage door industry. Overhead Door Company of Wilmington™ serves commercial and residential garage door needs in much of New Hanover County in coastal southeastern North Carolina, including Wilmington, Southport, Hampstead, Sunset Beach and Leland. With stiff competition for doors and door services from generic garage-door businesses, Overhead Door Company of Wilmington™ needed to drive non-branded traffic to its website to help position itself as a regional leader in the industry, improve its website rankings and generate more leads.

Challenge:
Beginning in 2018, ER Marketing created new blogs every week for Wilmington, which was initially successful, but tough to maintain as the ER Marketing team quickly covered every possible topic for new blogs. Given the ever-changing nature of SEO, ER Marketing rethought the best strategy to maintain traffic to the Overhead Door Company of Wilmington™ website. Blog optimization emerged as the best practice.

Solution:
ER Marketing updated the business’s template so multiple features/widgets on a sidebar perform a specific purpose in the name of SEO and automatically add value to each post. For example, ER Marketing added a “Related Articles” section at the top of the sidebar. This section features three recent blog posts with their title and description. Doing this ensures that, by default, all blog posts are linked to at least three other posts to add extra value to each post. This quickly shows the website has content on multiple topics and demonstrates that Overhead Door Company of Wilmington™ is a thought leader. These automatic internal links added to each post also makes it easier for Google to quickly discover the post and index it properly.

The addition of a slideshow on the sidebar that rotates a handful of high-quality images shows an example of the client's work, but, on the backend, each image has an alt tag that describes the image. This allows for another area to add text content and enrich the content with keywords. These steps, with the addition of updated publication dates to trigger relevancy and timeliness for search engines, new images inside the content itself, schema markup, quality linking, and new copy written for each blog post, made a difference for the Overhead Door Company of Wilmington™ and its website. By March 2023, the website had skyrocketed. It now holds the #1 ranking for many high-value keywords.

Summary:
The site today, after optimizing the blog posts, consistently breaks all-time highs in metrics, including 1.3 million impressions since March 2022 and 7,000 clicks. For comparison, in Q1 2022 the site had 338 clicks and 128,000 impressions. In Q1 2023, it had 2,650 clicks—a 684% increase—and 300,000 impressions—a 134% increase. In April 2022, there were 21 keywords on the first page, but by May 2023, there were 112 on first page, which is a 433% increase.