Case study · Mobile dog grooming
Pet Spa Luxe: one van, six counties, and a website that only named one town
A mobile grooming business whose van goes from Berkeley to Napa. Its website only spoke to the one town it is based in.
- Business
- Pet Spa Luxe
- Market
- El Sobrante, CA
- Type
- Mobile dog grooming, no walk-in salon
- Live at
- petspaluxe.com
- Pages built
- 35 pages
- Service areas
- 15 cities across 6 counties
The situation
What the business had
Pet Spa Luxe is a luxury mobile dog grooming business based in El Sobrante, in the East Bay. The van travels a long way. It covers Contra Costa, Alameda, Marin, Solano, Napa and Sonoma counties. The business has a strong name, with a 5.0 star rating on Yelp.
The problem was location. A mobile business cannot lean on the map the way a salon can. Google's map results depend a lot on how close the searcher is to the business. El Sobrante is not close to Napa. Someone in Walnut Creek searching for mobile dog grooming was not going to find a business whose whole website pointed at one town thirty minutes away.
There was also a small but tricky reviews problem. The business had real five-star Google reviews, sent to us as screenshots. It had a real 5.0 Yelp rating. But the review count was different depending on where you looked. That is exactly the spot where most agencies make up a tidy number.
The diagnosis
What was structurally wrong
The towns lived in a footer
Fifteen real service cities, and nothing on the web about grooming in any of them. A search in Concord, Berkeley, Novato or Vallejo had no page to match.
Services were one list, not four subjects
A full haircut, a bath and deshed, a nail and ear visit, and mobile grooming itself are four different searches. They were one page.
A home address that needed care
The business has a base address so its details match everywhere. But customers never go there. Grooming happens at their home. Showing it as a place to visit would have been wrong and unhelpful.
Real reviews with no one trusted total
Each review could be checked. The total count could not. Yelp, Google and the screenshots did not agree. Making up a count would have been the easy way out.
The build
What we changed
The website
A page for each of the fifteen cities
One page per city. Each one names its county and is written about that place. Not a template with the name swapped. El Sobrante, the home base, got its own hand-written page.
Four service pages instead of one list
Mobile dog grooming, full haircuts and grooming, bath and deshedding, and nail and ear care. Each one is a real page about that service. That is what lets it rank for that search.
A booking page and a working contact form
A booking page, plus a contact form that emails a real inbox. If the send fails, the form tells the visitor to call instead. A form that fails quietly is worse than no form.
35 pages in total
Ten core pages, four service pages, fifteen city pages and six articles. All of them can be reached by normal links. All of them are in the sitemap.
The Google Business Profile and business details
Set up as a service-area business
The base address stays the same everywhere so the details match. But the site never shows it as a place a customer can go. Every call to action is about the van coming to them.
Services list matched to the service pages
The services on the profile and the services with pages on the site are the same, with the same names. That match is a big part of what Google means by a good fit.
Reviews, handled honestly
Only reviews we could really read were used
Two of the Google reviews sent as screenshots were left out. One only showed as a Google translation into Portuguese, with the English hidden. One only showed the owner's reply, not the customer's words. Misquoting a real customer to fill a spot was not worth it.
No made-up star total
The 5.0 Yelp rating is shown because it is real. No Google star average and no total review count appear anywhere, because the sources did not agree. The reviews page links to the live listings, so the reader can see the current numbers themselves.
No hidden star code
No hidden code was added to get stars in search results. Google restricts that, and the gain is only cosmetic.
Results
What went live, and what we can't tell you yet
What went live
- Live on the client's own domain, petspaluxe.com. Every page points to the real domain, not a temporary one.
- 35 pages in the sitemap, up from a website that spoke to one of fifteen cities.
- The hidden labels that tell Google what each page is, on every page. No star-rating code anywhere.
- A contact form that tells the visitor when a send fails, instead of hiding it.
Why there are no result numbers here
We have not shown search results for this site. Search Console is connected. But we have not checked a set of data we would stand behind. A percentage with no metric, no dates and no source is not proof. When there is a real before-and-after to show, it will appear here with all of those.
What we took from it
Lessons
- For a mobile groomer, the website carries the towns
- The map will mostly show you near your base. Pages about the places you really drive to are the only real way into those towns. That is why fifteen of this site's pages are city pages.
- A real number beats a tidy one
- Saying '5.0 on Yelp' and nothing else looks less impressive than '5.0 from 40+ reviews'. But it is true, and it survives a customer checking.
- Leaving a review spot empty is allowed
- Two real reviews were dropped because we could not read the customer's real words. The page is a little shorter and fully trusted.