Self-Storage Industry Case Study

Overview

In this case study, you’ll learn how we were able to boost local organic rankings to the 1st page on Google, for a local storage business, dominated by national listing sites.

Local SEO is so important to Self storage facilities because they typically serve a customer base that resides within a 3 to 5 mile radius, so audience targeting is very tight and hyper local.

Background

This business came to Creative Website Marketing for strategic Digital Marketing services, to help promote their storage expansion, increase local website traffic through a short-term PPC campaign and a long term SEO program. 

This company started in 2015. They compete with other businesses that have a longer online presence, creating a challenge to achieve higher organic rankings and top listings in the Local Pack. The original website was not easy to navigate quickly and lacked a user friendly design & navigation structure. 

Top organic rankings in the storage space on Google are now dominated by large national aggregator listing sites aggressively optimized for local rankings, making it difficult for a small local site to penetrate and achieve 1st page rankings. The competition for online visibility is fierce as self storage is a $38 billion industry in the US.

Creative Website Marketing has extensive background in successful SEO for multi location and national listing websites to help jumpstart local organic results.

Managed Solutions – SEO & Paid Advertising

At the beginning of 2020, organic traffic averaged about 20 sessions per week. This business came to us for Google & Facebook advertising help starting in April to promote a new storage facility grand opening for a fixed timeframe. 

In June, a new Google My Business (GMB) listing was created. In August, we conducted an SEO Audit to compliment a new website redesign. 

This SEO Audit provided a specific guide to position the new website for immediate success:

• Target keywords (search intent research & competitor analysis)
• New site map
• Navigation structure
• URL structure
• On-page SEO
• URL redirect guide
• Schema markup 
• Guide to solicit GMB reviews
• Scalable location pages to support future business expansion
• Expanded content depth (blog, guide & FAQ’s)

A new website was needed to achieve an improved search visibility and UX. Due to business growth, it offers multiple highly secure storage facilities (Self, RV, Vehicle, Boat) with an expansion variety of storage types (Indoor, Outdoor, Covered, Climate Controlled) as well as a moving truck rental service and a retail store for moving & packing supplies.

The newly optimized website launched in September. You can see below the solid uptick in users below, with the website now averaging around 70 sessions per week, or a +250% increase in traffic compared to the first half of the year. 

Organic Sessions

Because there can be seasonality in the storage business, we looked at the year over year traffic difference since the new website launched and have seen a +163% increase in the 14 days the website has been live.

After the new website launched with an improved UX and site speed, the bounce rate improved +60%, from 68% on the old website to 26% on the new website. Looking at YTD performance, the bounce rate has improved 51.9% YOY. This has a positive impact on SEO performance.

Key Takeaways

SEO is a long term strategy and can take 6+ months to have an impact. Creative Website Marketing has an advantage over competitors, as we are able to apply our 28 years of experience and expertise across multiple industries to jumpstart shorter term results.

The storage space is highly competitive to achieve 1st page visibility on search engines, so our monthly managed SEO package allows us to monitor rankings using a flexible approach to implement ongoing improvements within a set budget.

Our proven SEO strategy can help your business achieve the search visibility your business needs to win new customers. Request a proposal for your company today.