Water Damage Company Case Study

Disaster Plus has been Charleston’s trusted leader in water, mold, fire, and smoke damage restoration since 1986. Locally owned and operated by Fred and Tracy Norris, the company provides 24/7 emergency services to both residential and commercial clients across the Lowcountry. With nearly four decades of experience, Disaster Plus has built a reputation for reliability, expertise, and compassionate care, helping homeowners and businesses recover from disasters with efficiency and professionalism. Their dedication to customer service and innovative solutions ensures they are always ready to tackle even the most challenging restoration projects.

Despite having a website presence, the site's outdated design, slow performance, and narrow SEO focus were hindering their growth. Their previous marketing agency had not structured their site properly in addition to narrowly focusing their site on "water damage," ignoring their wider service range, which significantly limited their online visibility. Disaster Plus needed a growth partner to drive their digital strategy holistically for better online visibility, conversions, and business growth.

We began with a Strategic Blueprint to analyze Disaster Plus’s online presence, identify key challenges, and create a clear path forward. This process revealed a sluggish website with broken features, ineffective content, and a disjointed user experience, along with a shallow online presence that limited visibility for their wide range of services. Based on these findings, we implemented a multi-faceted approach: a complete website redesign, a comprehensive SEO strategy to enhance local rankings and broaden their reach, and a diverse advertising plan utilizing Google Guaranteed, PPC, and retargeting ads. 

Despite having a website presence, the site's outdated design, slow performance, and narrow SEO focus were hindering their growth. Their previous marketing agency had not structured their site properly in addition to narrowly focusing their site on "water damage," ignoring their wider service range, which significantly limited their online visibility. Disaster Plus needed a growth partner to drive their digital strategy holistically for better online visibility, conversions, and business growth.

We began with a full website redesign aimed at transforming the user experience, optimizing conversion rates, boosting search engine rankings, and improving their quality score for Google Ads.

• Technical Issues: The existing site was plagued by slow load times, especially for mobile users, negatively affecting SEO and user engagement. There were also other technical issues with the site that was limiting their ability to rank.
  
• Broken Features: Key elements such as slideshows and internal links were malfunctioning, which created a frustrating user experience.
  
• Plugin Overload: The site contained over 49 outdated plugins, which bogged down site performance and security.
  
• Disjointed User Experience: The navigation and layout led to a fragmented and inconsistent user journey.
  
• Ineffective Content: Much of the content focused on SEO alone, sacrificing readability and user engagement.

• Streamlined Design: We enhanced the user interface with a clean, intuitive design, focusing on seamless navigation and an easy user journey tailored for emergency service needs, driving higher conversion rates. 
• Balanced Content: Content was optimized for search engines but crafted to engage real people, blending conversational tone with essential information.
• Highlighting Key Information: We prioritized quick access to critical information which included a sticky header with the phone number, addressing the urgency customers often face when seeking disaster recovery services.
• Reviews: People rely heavily on reviews when making decisions, so we designed the site to prominently showcase them, helping to boost conversions.
• Plugin Optimization: Reducing the number of plugins improved site performance, reliability, and security.
• Visual Appeal: The new design delivered a professional, visually appealing, and user-friendly interface.

The previous SEO efforts focused solely on "water damage," limiting online visibility. Our strategy expanded their reach across all service offerings and locations, improving local map pack rankings and overall organic traffic.

• SEO Blueprint Development: Identified immediate and long-term opportunities for growth.
• Extensive Audit: Conducted an in-depth analysis of their website and online footprint to pinpoint technical SEO issues.
• Competitor Analysis: Uncovered what would be required to position Disaster Plus as a leader for all relevant service keywords.
• Diverse Keyword Targeting: Expanded to include services such as mold removal, fire damage repair, flood cleanup, etc., resulting in higher local map rankings.
• On Site Optimization: Fixed the structure of the website and optimized each page for targeted keywords. This included content creation, setting up proper schema for each page, and an internal linking strategy.
• Off Page Optimization: This included Google Business Page optimization, local citations, press releases, and a link building stratgy targeting high quality niche related websites with good traffic.

Disaster Plus had no prior paid advertising presence. We launched a three-pronged approach with Google Guaranteed Local Service Ads, PPC ads, and Retargeting Display Ad Campaigns to accompany our SEO rankings and dominate search results.

• Comprehensive Presence: Our strategy ensured maximum exposure on Google's first page through a combination of Google Guaranteed Local Service Ads, PPC Ads, map pack visibility, and organic results.
• Enhanced Conversions: Paid ads allowed them to show up at the top of page one right away which is important when dealing with an emergency service, while we worked on their organic rankings. which significantly boosted conversions.
• Retargeting Ads: We also implemented a robust retargeting strategy, ensuring continuous engagement with potential customers who visited the site but did not convert initially.

The Website Redesign: The website redesign led to higher search engine rankings, improved ad quality scores, and a boost in conversion rates, creating a more user-centric and visually impressive online presence for Disaster Plus.
 

The Ad Strategy: With local service ads featuring the Google Guaranteed Badge, PPC, and retargeting campaigns their CTR (click through rates) and conversions increased dramatically. These ads allowed them to show at the very top of the search results, exactly where Disaster Plus needed to be seen when a customer had an emergency.
 

The SEO Strategy: Our SEO strategy resulted in over 15 #1 organic keyword rankings and over 75 first-page keyword organic rankings (spots 1-10). At the end of the first year they had more than 230 organic keywords within the top 10 pages of Google search, with continuous growth each month.