SEO for Plumbing Company Harpers Plumbing

# Initial data

Harpers Plumbing (Calgary, Alberta) started with a website that wasn’t getting much traction in search – only a couple low-frequency commercial keywords in the top 10, and traffic averaging around 40 users per month. Off-page signals were also weak at the beginning, with a low domain rating and a backlink profile that included a lot of spammy links.

At the time of promotion, the site had only 2 low-frequency commercial keywords in the top 10. Traffic averaged 40 users per month. The company has an exceptional service for providing plumbing services, so the site was visited directly, so to speak by acquaintance. External optimization was at an embryonic level – DR was 11, 25 referring domains and 111 backlinks, most of which are spammy.

Top 3 competitors were very strong in terms of linkbuilding sites. When I say very strong competitors it means that the number of their links is measured in hundreds, some thousands, that is, even with huge investments in linkbuilding, promotion can take a couple of years:

For many keywords in this niche we have such a competitor as the platform www.kijiji.ca which provides services of private plumbers. It is almost impossible to compete with this platform and here is why:

If you compare our DR – 11 and DR 80, the difference is huge. If you compare our 111 backlinks vs. 4.7 mil, 10 years of advancement doesn’t help. So what should we do? Is that even possible? Is it possible to rank in the top 3 in such a tough competition? Yes, if you choose the right strategy.

# Solutions

We approached the project with a full SEO audit and cleanup, tackling technical and on-page issues like code validation errors, slow load speed, duplicate pages, heading structure problems, weak/missing semantic targeting, unoptimized meta tags, thin SEO content, internal linking gaps, and E-E-A-T issues in the blog. The strategy focused first on on-page SEO and long-tail keywords to find quick wins against stronger competitors, then expanded into content, internal linking, schema markup, and later modest link building.

# Results

Within 8 months, the campaign moved a significant number of keywords into stronger positions (including multiple terms in the Top 3/Top 10) and increased organic traffic by about 5x. The case study also notes the shift toward AI-driven search results (like Google’s AI Overviews) and the importance of being surfaced as a cited source – something the ongoing strategy is designed to support.

This is just the beginning, and we’re continuing to work on the project because SEO is an ongoing process.