Industry: Lawn care – Sod supplier
Company Size: Family business, 20-25 employees
Region: Austin, Texas
Our Service: Lawn Care SEO
About the client:
We partnered with a family-owned business that delivers premium grass sod throughout Texas. They’ve built their reputation on quality turf varieties adapted to local climates. Their direct farm-to-customer model eliminates intermediaries and provides fresher products at better prices. With a couple of growing locations across Texas, they’ve established themselves as a regional leader in the turf industry. Despite these strengths, their digital performance took a serious hit between 2021 and 2023.
The Challenge
Traffic numbers told a story. The client enjoyed about 10,000 organic visits during their strong spring-summer 2021 season. This number crashed to just 4,500 visits at their 2022 peak. They recovered slightly to 6,500 organic visits in 2023. This decline directly impacted visibility, lead generation, and overall sales potential during their critical months.
Our initial audit uncovered several problems:
- Product pages and blog posts contained thin content
- Pop-ups blocked Google from accessing essential page elements
- Navigation structure limited effective content discovery
- Competitors gained visibility while our client lost market share
Goals and Objectives
When we began working with them in October 2023, the primary challenge was clear: reverse the downward trend and help them regain lost visibility before the next spring-summer season started. The goal was to recover previous performance levels and position them for sustained growth going into 2024.
- Improve overall visits to the level of 2021 – at minimum.
- Achieve top-ranking visibility for high-intent, location-based search queries targeting Zoysia, St. Augustine, and Bermuda grass—specifically long-tail keywords incorporating modifiers such as ‘near me’ and geo-targeted terms including ‘Texas,’ ‘Austin,’ and ‘San Antonio.’
- Increase revenue from organic online sources, primarily organic traffic.
Here’s the overview of the website’s historic traffic:
Here’s the overview of the website’s historic traffic for product pages:
Our Strategic Approach
We began our work in October 2023 with a clear goal: reverse the downward trend before the crucial 2024 spring-summer season. Our plan attacked the problem from multiple angles.
Data-driven Keyword Research and Content Strategy
We focused our keyword research on terms with real buying intent. This included location-based search queries with “near me” modifiers and geo-targeted terms like “Texas,” “Austin,” and “San Antonio.” We paid special attention to product-specific searches for Zoysia, St. Augustine, and Bermuda grass varieties.
Our research revealed different search patterns between Austin and San Antonio customers.
Technical SEO and UX Improvements
We tackled the technical barriers right away:
- We removed pop-ups that blocked title tags and key content
- We rebuilt the navigation menu to distribute link equity better
These basic fixes delivered quick wins in site visibility and user engagement metrics. Google could now correctly index the site’s valuable content.
High-quality Content Creation
As the content of blog posts was thin and outdated in most cases, we created a content plan with relevant topics and directly focused on our client’s products. Our copywriters created blog posts based on outlines that covered subtopics each post should have to be able to rank for a given keyword.
Local Pages Redesign & Optimization
Our local SEO strategic approach aimed to position the client’s Google Business profiles as high as possible in local searches and to increase conversions for locally focused keywords.
We redesigned critical revenue-driving pages for Austin and San Antonio, including key pickup location pages. We optimized the user experience and conversion rate, enhanced on-page SEO elements, and aligned content with local search intent. We paid special attention to elements in the above-the-fold part of the pages to enable users and search engines to realize what pages are about and to increase conversions. Local schemas also played a significant part in our local page optimization.
Advanced Content Audit
As we didn’t make any changes to existing blog posts at the beginning of cooperation with the client in September 2024, we decided to conduct a more detailed content audit. We wanted to uncover hidden opportunities and address underperformance, going beyond the typical page-by-page review.
First, we created detailed page-level reports (see screenshot below) to assess overall content quality, traffic, and current keyword visibility, as well as factors such as backlinks, on-page factors (H1, meta titles, and meta descriptions), and word count. This gave us a clear picture of which pages were underperforming or outdated; many dated back to 2011–2013 and no longer met today’s SEO standards.
Next, we layered in keyword-level analysis by mapping each key page’s top five ranking keywords (see screenshot below). This allowed us to evaluate the true intent behind the traffic, identify missed opportunities, and detect potential content cannibalization. The combined insights helped us determine whether a page needed to be optimized, merged with similar content, or removed altogether.
Together, these two views formed the backbone of our content strategy—ensuring that every page served a purpose and contributed to organic growth.
Link Building with Steady Momentum
We launched a backlink acquisition campaign to build domain authority and improve rankings for competitive terms. We secured high-quality links at a consistent pace of at least four per month, each strategically placed to support core pages and boost topical authority.
Internal linking process
One of the most impactful aspects of our strategy—and one we’re particularly proud of—was overhauling the internal linking structure. We began by conducting a full-scale mapping of all internal links across the website. From there, we prioritized pages based on their strategic importance, such as revenue potential, local search relevance, and existing keyword rankings.
Using this data-driven approach, we redistributed internal links to ensure that high-priority pages—especially product and location—received the strongest internal support. This improved crawlability, user navigation, and passed link equity where it mattered most, amplifying the site’s overall SEO value.
This sheet shows which pages get the most internal link juice—authority value from other pages pointing to them. In this case, clients’ shop pages receive the most link juice on average after implementing an internal linking strategy.
The Results
Our SEO strategy delivered strong results in just 8 months:
- Shop page visits tripled during the 2024 season
- Overall organic traffic grew 2.5 times compared to last year
- Keyword visibility jumped 67% (from 2,775 to 4,620 keywords)
- 1,450 keywords now rank in the top 10 positions (450 in the top 3)
- Organic sales increased by 46% year-over-year
- Time on site and pages per session showed significant improvement
We didn’t just restore the client’s previous traffic levels. We far exceeded them. This Austin-based sod supplier now enjoys a stronger market position with sustainable growth potential.
Ready for Similar Results?
Our data-driven approach can help your business achieve remarkable organic growth too. Contact us today to discuss your specific market challenges.