A-1 Concrete Leveling wanted to help franchisees' grow their business, but resources were limited.

In 2019, the A-1 Concrete Leveling franchise boasted 55 locations across the country, but only one dedicated corporate marketing employee.

Growth had stagnated for this nearly 40-year-old business, and Director of Marketing and Communications Dale Pease wanted to generate more leads through increased digital marketing efforts.

To do this, he would need to win over franchisees, overcome an underperforming website, and work within tight budget constraints.

Read on for a summary of the results of our partnership, more about A-1's challenges, and how we overcame them together.

Growth had stagnated for America’s largest concrete leveler.

In 2019, for the first time in their nearly 40-year history, national franchise A-1 Concrete Leveling’s growth had stagnated.

The company wanted to help franchisees grow their businesses, but marketing performance and digital lead generation efforts in particular varied across its 55 locations, despite the company’s diligence in investing in traditional marketing channels.

As a result of working with an SEO consultant a few years prior, the franchise generated a respectable number of leads each month via organic search traffic on their corporate website and achieved search rank for some valuable keywords there. But A-1’s team felt the company had only scratched the surface when it came to SEO and other digital marketing lead generation channels.

This led A-1’s Director of Marketing and Communications, Dale Pease, to believe renewed focus on SEO would be a key factor in achieving growth. But the franchise lacked a long-term partner that could provide the strategy and services needed to achieve those results.

"I felt like we’d plateaued a bit from a SEO perspective, and it was clear neither me nor anyone else here at A-1 had the time and expertise needed to help us get over that hump. We chose to work with Madison Marketing Group because they had worked with franchises before, and I was impressed by their strategic approach.”

- Dale Pease, Director of Marketing & Communications, A-1 Concrete Leveling, Inc.

A-1 wanted to grow its business, but a thin budget, limited staff, and an underperforming website stood in the way.

Pease was, and still is, A-1 Concrete Leveling Corporate’s only dedicated marketing employee. He was already squeezing the most he could out of a slim marketing budget, and securing more budget dollars proved challenging.

The corporate site needed improvements to its architecture, content, and design to generate more leads and rank higher in organic search results with the end goal of growing its locations’ businesses.

To this end, the corporate site would have to replace the need for separate franchisee sites in order to maintain brand consistency. Among franchise locations that had their own websites, there were a wide variety of designs and adherence to SEO best practices.

Moreover, existing franchisee websites were competing with the corporate website for space on search result pages, potentially confusing searchers. However, franchisees hesitated to change their websites, because they were generating leads.

Despite these challenges, A-1 was able to carve out a modest scope for our SEO consulting services. We used this scope to guide the design and development of A-1’s corporate website, which Pease would execute internally. It included:

A custom SEO assessment

First, we evaluated the current performance of A-1 Concrete Leveling’s corporate site, including but not limited to:

• Keywords that pages already ranked for in search results (e.g. “driveway leveling”)

• Visitors’ behavior on the corporate website

• Which pages drove the highest engagement among users and most often resulted in a conversion

• Location page search traffic and ranking performance

• Keywords that competitors ranked for that A-1 Concrete Leveling didn’t

• Technical performance, including page load speed on mobile devices

Then, we provided a set of recommendations for optimization, including:

• Covering services and other important topics on dedicated pages and in greater detail to beat competitor pages in search rankings

• Creating webs of topics and subtopic pages connected with hyperlinks to earn search rank

• Creating location microsites on the corporate website with intuitive navigation and correct business info that would give each location a better chance of earning search rank in its local market

• Working to boost pages already ranking for valuable keywords to rank even higher, an easier feat than trying to rank for new keywords

• Replacing pages that weren’t ranking for valuable keywords with better pages to rank higher in search results

• Claiming and updating citations off-site, such as directory and Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) listings

• Improving page load speed by moving DNS management to Cloudflare (a managed system) to reduce JavaScript and CSS file load time as well as improve security

Keyword research

We identified words and phrases used by people interested in services and topics relevant to A1 Concrete Leveling to find information online and created a database.

This involved a multi-step process that included:

• Using Google Search Console to identify which topics A1’s website currently ranked in search results for

• Brainstorming a list of additional topics relevant to the clients’ business based on the clients’ website, conversations with the client, and known competitors’ websites

• Presenting the client with the finished list of topics to eliminate anything irrelevant

• Plugging the finished topic list into keyword research software and Google Search to find all keyword opportunities associated with those topics

Next steps

At the end of 2019, A-1 Concrete Leveling launched its refreshed website, but there were still gaps that needed to be filled on the local market side to achieve its goal of more leads for franchisees.

"The improvements we made to the corporate site provided a good foundation for improved search performance, but I wanted to see how we could build on that work to boost visibility and lead generation results at the local market level,”

- Dale Pease, Director of Marketing & Communications, A-1 Concrete Leveling, Inc.

We discovered that, in the 12 months leading up to Q4 2019, 23% of visitors to the corporate site visited franchise location pages, indicating some buying intent. This provided a low-hanging opportunity for A-1 to achieve its goal of improving location performance and growth.

After Pease approached us for advice, we put together a three-point plan for improving A-1 Concrete Leveling’s search visibility in local markets.

We also suggested using a small portion of the paid media budget for retargeting display ad campaigns, a relatively inexpensive strategy that targets people who have already shown interest in A-1 Concrete Leveling’s services by visiting its website.

We implemented these advertising campaigns in early 2021.