Guard Up Pest Control

The brief

Guard Up Pest Control is a pest control company serving Santa Clarita and the surrounding area, covering rodents, cockroaches, ants, mosquitoes, bed bugs and termites. The work was the full stack rather than a single service:

• The website, designed and built from scratch, with a service page per pest rather than one page listing them all.
• Ongoing SEO, technical and on-page, maintained rather than delivered once.
• Blog writing, for the questions people search before they call anybody.
• Google Business Profile optimisation, which for this kind of business is not a side task.
• Review management and automation, so asking for reviews happens by default instead of when somebody remembers.
• Social media marketing, running alongside the rest.

Calls, which is the number that matters

Google supplies both the figure and the comparison, so there is no modelling in that table. Working backwards from the rounded percentage, the same five months a year earlier produced roughly 237 calls. The work added somewhere near 90 extra phone calls in five months.

The profile out-performs the website

Organic search sent the website 599 clicks in twelve months, from 101,000 impressions at 0.6% CTR and an average position of 12.3. That works out at roughly 50 clicks a month. Now put it next to the profile:

The Business Profile sends more traffic to the website than organic search does, 70 clicks a month against 50, and that is before counting the 327 calls that never touch the website at all. Across every action, the profile is doing roughly four times the volume of the organic listing.

That is the single most useful thing on this page, and it is the evidence behind a claim I make on the Furrever Friends case study, where pet cremation near me drew 1,704 impressions and 10 clicks. Near-me searches are answered by the map pack. For a local service business the profile is not a supporting channel, it is the channel, and the website's job is partly to make the profile rank.

Which also explains the 0.6%

A 0.6% click rate looks poor read on its own. Most of those 101,000 impressions are the blue link sitting underneath a map pack that the same business already occupies. The click was taken higher up the page. Counting that as a failure of the website would be counting the same win as a loss.

Share of local voice, not average rank

The cover of this page is a local search grid. Each marker is the map pack position at one physical point in Santa Clarita, and for pest guard exterminator company almost every point in the grid returns first place, with a small number of twos and one point where the business does not surface at all.

Grids matter because map rankings are not one number. You can be first outside your own office and invisible four miles away, and a single average rank hides exactly that. Share of local voice is the percentage of grid points where a business appears in the top three, so it measures coverage rather than a best case.

The head term, pest control santa clarita, sits just past the bottom of the screenshot at 6.3, a 3.7 place improvement, with 14.3% share of local voice, up 12.2 points.

Rank moves a little, coverage moves a lot

Look at cockroaches santa clarita. Average rank improved from 5.7 to 3.4, which reads as a modest two place gain. Share of local voice went from 6.1% to 65.3%, a ten-fold increase.

Both describe the same change. The first one almost entirely hides it. The business went from showing up in a thin band near its own address to covering most of the city, and average rank barely flickered because it was already ranking well in the places it ranked at all.

The same pattern repeats: pest control companies in santa clarita from 14.3% to 69.4%, santa clarita roaches treatment in the walls from 2.0% to 12.2%, termite companies near santa clarita ca from 2.0% to 10.2%. If you are being reported to on average rank alone, this is the movement you are not being shown. It is the local version of the point the Dr Kish case study makes about average position.

Two of them went backwards

eco-friendly pest control santa clarita ca lost ground on both measures, 3.9 to 4.1 on rank and 18.4% down to 14.3% on coverage. affordable exterminator santa clarita did the same, 4.1 to 4.4 and 32.7% down to 30.6%.

They are in the table because they are in the data. Both are qualifier terms, eco-friendly and affordable, and both slipping while the pest-specific terms climbed is a pattern worth a look rather than a rounding error. It is the kind of thing that only gets noticed if the losing rows are still on the report.

One of the keywords is in Spanish

club fumigador de cucarachas santa clarita ca is a Spanish-language search for cockroach extermination. Coverage went from 4.1% to 22.4%, better than a five-fold improvement, and the business now averages 4.5 across the grid on it.

Santa Clarita has a large Spanish-speaking population and a pest problem does not wait for anybody to switch languages. This is the same lesson as The Girl's Mart, where most of the demand arrived in Bangla against an English-language site: read the script and the vocabulary in the data before deciding what to write.

What I would do next

1. Find out why the two qualifier terms slipped. Eco-friendly and affordable are both buying signals, and both moved the wrong way while everything else improved.
2. Build the Spanish side out properly. One tracked Spanish query improved five-fold almost incidentally. That is a signal, not a finished job.
3. Push coverage on the head term. pest control santa clarita is the biggest term in the set and sits at 14.3% share of local voice. Rank is fine. Reach is not.
4. Keep the review engine running. Review volume and recency feed map rankings continuously, which means it is maintenance, not a project with an end date.
5. Leave the 0.6% CTR alone. It is a symptom of winning the map pack, and chasing it would be optimising the wrong listing.

What this does not prove

• Calls are not jobs and jobs are not revenue. 327 calls is the closest thing to an outcome on this website, and it is still a step short of money in the bank. Booking and revenue data belongs to the client.
• The grid and rank figures come from a third-party tracker, not from Google. They are consistent and they are dated, but they are somebody's measurement rather than Google's own.
• The Search Console window and the profile window are different lengths, twelve months against five. Every comparison between them in the table above is stated per month for that reason.
• The prior-year call figure of roughly 237 is derived from Google's rounded percentage, not read off a report. The 327 and the 38% are Google's.
• A chart cannot prove causation. The work and the improvement happened over the same period, which is not the same as one producing the other.

If you run a local service business and your reporting is all impressions and average rank, the question to ask is how many people phoned. That is the first thing a free audit tries to answer.