Gold Star Plumbing & Drain’s organic leads rose 874% over two years. Organic traffic rose 246% in the same period. Those are not two ways of saying the same thing, and the gap between them is the most useful part of the case study.
The three figures
Over a two-year engagement:
- +874% organic leads
- +246% organic traffic
- +342% Google Search Console impressions
Set out as a row of percentages they read as one result stated three times. They are not. They measure three different things, they moved by very different amounts, and the differences say something that a single headline figure hides.
Leads rose far faster than traffic
This is the finding. If leads and traffic had grown together the explanation would be simple: more people arrived, so more people rang. They did not grow together. Leads outran traffic by a wide margin, which means the bulk of the additional work did not come from additional visitors. It came from people who were already going to arrive on the site, and who then did something they had not been doing before.
That part rarely makes a headline, because “we grew your traffic” is easier to sell than “we changed what your pages say and where the phone number sits.” For a trade it is usually where the return actually is. Traffic that never becomes a call is a cost rather than a result, which is the whole argument in why a business can rank first and still get no calls.
Impressions grew fastest and mean the least
Impressions finished 342% up. An impression is Google having shown the site to somebody: not a visit, not a click, not an intention. They grew faster than traffic, which is the ordinary shape when a site starts appearing for a much wider set of searches, plenty of which were never going to produce a plumbing job.
It is a genuine signal that the site became visible for more things, and it is not a business result. A report that leads on it has chosen the flattering number. What to watch instead of sessions goes into why the gap between impressions and clicks is worth reading rather than celebrating.
What two years of it looked like
Nothing here is exotic. The work was the ordinary combination: pages that covered the jobs the business actually wanted, technical faults fixed, the local profile kept accurate and current, and the same attention repeated month after month instead of delivered as a project and then left alone.
The word doing the work in that sentence is “repeated”. Two years is not long in search terms and it is a very long time in a contractor’s year, with two busy seasons inside it. Most engagements that fail do not fail on technique. They stop.
What a percentage does not tell you
A percentage is a ratio against a starting point, and a modest starting point produces impressive percentages. A business going from a handful of organic leads a month to a steady flow of them has done something well worth doing; the same absolute gain at a much larger business would not print as 874%.
So read a case study for its shape rather than its size. The shape here: leads growing much faster than traffic, impressions growing fastest of all, is repeatable and worth understanding. The specific percentages belong to one plumbing business, in one market, over one two-year period. Anyone offering you those numbers as a forecast is misusing them, and that includes us.
Frequently asked questions
Why did leads grow so much faster than traffic?
Because most of the gain was not about attracting more people. It came from what the pages did with the people already arriving: which questions they answered, and how little work it took to ring.
Are impressions worth tracking at all?
As an early indicator, yes. As a result, no. Impressions tell you Google is showing you for more searches. They say nothing about whether those searches produce work.
How long did this take?
Two years, with the improvement compounding rather than arriving at once. Search results move slowly, and the first several months of an engagement almost always show less than the ones after them.
Should I expect the same figures?
No. This is one plumbing business in one market, and a percentage depends heavily on where it started. The pattern is instructive. The number is not a forecast.
Where to start
Open your own analytics and put organic traffic next to leads for the last twelve months. If traffic has risen and leads have not, more traffic is not your problem, and buying more of it will not fix anything.
Real Time Marketing has worked with home service contractors since 2016: plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical and other trades, nationwide, from our office in Bradenton, Florida. Agreements are month-to-month. See our search optimisation or book a strategy call.
