§ 01
Case study · shipping containers · Southern California
It was not the algorithm
A regional container dealer came to us after organic traffic fell off a cliff and stayed down. The owner assumed a Google update. An update may have been the trigger, but it was not the cause.
§ 02
Why this case is here
Heavy delivery is where we started: a service radius, a phone that has to ring, and a results page you have to own in every town on the map. It is the same shape as a plumber, a roofer or a restoration crew, priced by the mile instead of the hour.
So read the four faults below as a method, not a vertical. We have found the same ones on trades, exteriors and cleaning companies that had never heard the word cannibalization and were told their traffic drop was an algorithm update.
§ 03
Four faults, built up over years
We ran a full crawl plus Semrush and Ahrefs audits. Nothing we found was exotic. All four are common, and all four are the kind of thing that only shows up as a collapse once something external shakes the results.
01
Pages competing with each other
Several pages targeting the same container-size and location terms. Google was picking a different URL for the same query week to week, so no single page ever accumulated enough authority to hold a position.
Authority split four ways. None of the four ranked.
02
A thin commercial footprint
The site ranked for a fraction of the keywords its closest competitor did, and the ones it held were almost all informational. Traffic was landing on pages that had no path to a quote.
Visits that could not convert, counted as success.
03
A contaminated backlink profile
A meaningful share of referring domains were spam. That is not a foundation to build on. It is something to disavow, route around, and replace slowly with links that would survive a manual review.
Years of link "building" that has to be undone first.
04
No coverage of its own radius
No dedicated pages for the metros inside the actual delivery zone, while the leading competitor had built out coverage city by city over several years.
Markets already being served, invisible in search.
§ 04
The coverage gap, drawn
The dealer delivered across a radius that covered a dozen metros. Search could find him in three of them. Every unlit dot on this diagram is a market where trucks already run and the phone does not.
This is the cheapest problem in the audit to describe and the slowest to fix, which is why it goes second rather than first.
§ 05
The recovery plan
Ordered by how fast each step can move, not by how impressive it sounds in a deck.
Stop the bleeding
Consolidate cannibalizing pages into single canonical targets, fix redirect chains, disavow the spam profile, and rebuild internal linking so authority reaches the pages that take quotes.
Own the radius
Service-area pages for every metro inside the delivery zone, ordered by volume against local pack difficulty. Real local content — inventory on hand, delivery pricing at that distance, permit context.
Take the comparison traffic
Buyer-intent content aimed at what people search before they call anyone: condition grades, size and spec guides, buy-versus-rent, delivered cost breakdowns.
Earn links that hold
Suppliers, haulers, trade associations, chambers, regional press. Slow, legitimate, and the only kind that does not need undoing in three years.
§ 06
Where this stands
The engagement is active and phases one and two are underway. There are no figures on this page for a boring reason: the client has not cleared us to publish them. We will not put a competitor's traffic curve on the internet to win an argument, and you would want the same courtesy. Ask on a call — what we can show, we will show you live.
On reporting
Plenty of agencies in this space will show you a 400% traffic increase measured from a base of almost nothing, or rankings for terms with no search volume. Both are easy to produce and neither pays for a truck.
We report rankings for commercial-intent terms in your actual service area, organic sessions, and the calls and forms that came from them. When a month goes badly, that is what the report says.
Next step
Find out what your site is costing you
Send your domain and the towns you deliver to. You get a written audit back within two business days: the technical faults, the service areas you have no page for, and the exact terms your closest competitor ranks for that you do not. No call required to receive it.