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Case Study

"Everyone on the marketing team that I work with, from my digital director and my creative team, loves Meticulosity.  We love working with them."

Tammy Marchi, Website Manager | California Closets

Services

Enterprise WordPress Development
Development & Optimization

Platform

WordPress

Franchise Locations

120+

Revenue

+250M

case study - california closets canada

Project Overview

 

For more than three decades, California Closets has built a reputation as a leader in premium and luxury space management, delivering truly custom products and unparalleled service. They have 120 showrooms and 800+
designers across the United States, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.

Before

Though Canadian franchises of California Closets have been operating successfully for over two decades, the CaliforniaClosets.com website wasn’t hitting its KPIs when it came to Canadian traffic. Rankings were lower in Canada than the US, traffic was marginal, and leads were not up to where they were expected to be.

After looking at the data and consulting with a market research team it was decided that a new website tailored specifically to Canadians would be the best way to increase relevance in this market.

Solution

 

To improve the local trust factor in Canada, we needed to identify what was alienating the Canadian visitors and to reassure them that they would be serviced by other Canadians who are familiar with their lifestyle and their needs.

Brand Name & TLD

The very name “California Closets” can be alienating to visitors north of the boarder as they automatically feel like this is an international location. To help combat that initial discord, we created a Canada-specific TLD (CaliforniaClosets.ca) for the new site.

Then, we revised the logo to include “Canada” – a simple change, but one that helped to reaffirm that this was not a site targeted only to those in California, which is a common belief to those unfamiliar with the brand.

Dynamic Location Attributes

Leveraging the location finder, when we know where someone is coming from (based on either IP, their location search, or the link they used to come to the site) we serve them custom information for their local showroom.

Localized phone numbers and showroom addresses help to make the site feel custom to them without duplicating hundreds of pages and running into duplicate content issues.

Localized Content

Custom contact information is not enough to secure strong rankings. Content is still king and when dealing with 13 different locations in Canada, differentiated content specific to the local market was the Ace up our sleeves to get localized rankings for target keywords in each of the regions.

Our team of content specialists worked to build content relevant to the main service offerings of each location, in both English and French, to boost relevancy for a wide range of services and solutions.

From Murphy beds in Ontario cottages to mudrooms for mucky Calgary Chinooks, the Canadian market has unique nuances, and we sought to capture those with content.

Off-Page Factors

Before we launched the CaliforniaClosets.ca website, all Canadian showroom locations were on CaliforniaClosets.com. These showroom location pages had been gathering local links for years and had a very solid foothold. Seeking out and revising thousands of off-site links to point to the new pages on the new domains was essential to ensure that we could bolster the domain authority of the new domain.

One of the considerations throughout the process is that we would be competing with the existing domain which has hundreds of thousands of links, lots of domain authority and would be hard to push down in the search results. We tracked down all those old links, then found new sources to build local links from.

Technical Considerations & Redirects

CaliforniaClosets.com, the original website, had a considerable amount of Canadian
traffic coming through it from organic search, referral links and local business
directories that were going to need to be redirected. Not executing these redirects
correctly could result in a significant loss in traffic and revenue.

To approach this, we first added in a Canada/US flag selection in the location finder to immediately redirect people who are looking for a Canadian location to the Canadian site. Then, when that was in place and running smoothly, we redirected the specific showroom landing pages to direct to the new site.

Following this, location-specific content was migrated over and redirects from those pages were added in as well. Done in this way, we were able to mitigate traffic loss and ensure a smooth transition for all Canadian traffic.

Analytics & Tracking

The main KPIs for California Closets are leads. Being able to properly attribute these
leads to the right sources is essential. California Closets has an impressive marketing
stack and we worked to ensure that all the different analytics platforms, call tracking,
internal lead tracking software, and numerous paid search campaigns spoke to each
other to provide a correct lead attribution reporting.

It was also important for us to monitor the performance of the US site to ensure that it was not suffering as a result of introducing a new competitor to the Canadian market. Using Moz to track rankings, we saw rankings increase for most markets quickly after launching.

It was important that we watched the performance of each franchise location closely, so as to not overgeneralize Canadian performance. For some of the franchises, this new content localized to their region exponentially increased rankings and search traffic. For others, there were additional barriers that needed to be addressed with our ongoing SEO engagement.

Results

 

Did the new website improve search engine rankings?

With a special focus on location-specific optimization, we were able to increase Canadian rankings from an average visibility of ~4% (ranking around position 8-9 in the search results pages) to ~10% (ranking around position 3 in the search results pages), for all 770+ tracked keywords. Rankings across Canada increased and, more importantly, in the individual regions where the franchises operate saw significant increases as well.

This is keyword ranking data from Moz. The dark blue line is the search rankings for CaliforniaClosets.ca and the teal line is CaliforniaClosets.com for keyword searches on Google.ca. The new .ca website launched at the end of July and we noticed rankings started to pick up quite steadily over the first three months across the entire site.

California Closets Case Study Analytics

As rankings in each region are important for the individual franchises, we also tracked these target keywords at the city level for eleven different cities. Some of these saw a direct boost as a result of the new Canadian site, such as the Calgary, Alberta rankings:California Closets Alberta Analytics

Other regions, such as Windsor, Ontario saw a nice boost when the site initially launched but saw the real increases when we started to redirect the .com showroom pages, which resulted in Google updating their SERP with the .ca page instead of the .com page. This in itself is a solid case study on the effectiveness of leveraging 301 redirects to maintain and even improve keyword rankings.

California Closets Ontario Analytics

Not all markets saw results in the first three months. Other markets required additional pushes, ensuring that schema markup was in place and reviewing off-page factors like Google My Business listings helped to improve those.

For some locations we noticed that the US site was still ranking very well and had to approach these individual situations with some SEO investigations to identify why. An example of this was London, Ontario region where we did some additional strategic redirects and revised their local link portfolio which resulted in the key ranking switch for the .ca and the .com site in this region:

California Closets London Ontario

As with any site, SEO should be an ongoing initiative and continuing to optimize the site will continue to result in improvements.

Did the new site generate more Canadian leads?

Increasing search rankings doesn’t mean anything if those searchers never come to the site or convert. For California Closets, these localized search results resonated well with Canadians due to their Canadian spelling, .ca TLD, and localized content.

As a result, we noticed the click-through rate increase, resulting in a 14.5% increase in non-paid Canadian traffic. More significantly, the conversion rate for contact requests nearly doubled from 3.47% to 6.5% which generated a 40% increase in Canadian leads.

Conclusion

Launching the Canadian website gave California Closets the ability to increase visibility and credibility in the Canadian market. Their website is now more effective in attracting and converting leads, which has resulted in an increase in sales. This was an all-hands-on-deck engagement that required many different stakeholders to come together and the end result directly reflects those efforts. This is a project that could not have come together without the diverse skills and meticulousness of all those involved.