Waverley Forklifts is a forklift hire, sales, and training business. They came to us with a problem I've seen too many times. Over-reliance on branded search terms and a sudden de-indexing crisis that threatened the entire business. Crisis recovery plus long-term growth, all at once.
The Problem
Heavy dependence on branded searches with minimal visibility for service-based keywords. Limited geographic reach outside Melbourne. And then the worst-case scenario: main service pages got de-indexed in October 2021. Organic leads dried up overnight.
What We Built
- Crisis triage: Identified and resolved the de-indexing cause. Trailing slash conflicts, duplicate sitemaps, and Yoast SEO configuration issues
- Service page templates. Scalable content structure for every service offering
- Location pages targeting Sydney, Melbourne, and other capital cities
- Link acquisition targeting service pages with relevant anchor text
- Supporting blog content building topical authority around forklift services
The Results
- 555% increase in organic traffic
- 204% increase in organic keywords
- 414% increase in top 3 ranking keywords
- 383% increase in non-branded keywords
- 25% improvement in website leads (target met)
Waverley Forklifts was a reminder that technical SEO isn't optional. One misconfiguration can tank an entire business. The monitoring systems I put in place at StudioHawk were designed to catch exactly these issues before they become crises.
