Multi-Location

#1 rankings for 300+ towns and cities

How we generated $334k worth of free monthly organic traffic for Self-Storage Marketplace - WhatStorage.

Increase in Organic Traffic

0 to 30k

No.1 City Rankings

300+

Increase in Monthly Traffic Value

$334k

The Client

WhatStorage is the UK's largest online self-storage marketplace - it was co-founded, operated, and SEO'd by the team members here at To The Top Agency.

We believe we're the best in the world at what we do. We don’t just sell SEO to clients, we also practice what we preach on our own websites!

Within just 18 months of SEO, we managed to:

Rank WhatStorage within the No.1 in over 300 towns and cities.
Outrank UK's storage giants including Big Yellow and Safestore with a much smaller budget.
Generate 30,000 Monthly Organic traffic worth over $334,000 in Google Ads value.
Generate over ten's of thousands of leads from Phone Calls and Email Enquiries.

WhatStorage now has 30% of the storage facilities in the UK on its platform, with the primary source of traffic being Organic Traffic.

Rafael Castro

Co-Founder

WhatStorage

Marvin and his team were crucial to the success of WhatStorage's launch. Within just months, our website was able to dominate the search results pages, ranking at the top for every town and city across the UK. Because of the boost in organic traffic, our website was able to generate more leads for our partners.

The Problem

To The Top does not follow a one-size-fits-all SEO strategy. We make sure to tailor each one according to the site's needs. A thorough site audit revealed the pain points of the site. Here are some of our findings:

This was a brand-new website with zero domain authority (DA). The websites dominating the top 3 positions in the Search Results for the main keywords such as "self storage London" had much higher DA and backlinks.

We had to overcome that deficit quickly by building high-quality backlinks to the website while keeping within Google's guidelines.
It would be challenging to build backlinks to all of the hundreds of landing pages. We had to ensure that the website architecture was optimized so that the internal 'link equity' flowed efficiently between each landing page.
We needed to generate leads nationwide, in every town and city in the UK. We had to create location landing pages that were optimized for User Experience, Conversions, and SEO.
The website contained thousands of pages with a complex build connected to various APIs. We had to conduct a scalable technical audit on all the pages to ensure that the site was free of any technical errors that could hinder the SEO campaign.

Technical SEO Audit

The Solution

Correlation Data (CORA) Report for "Self Storage"

Technical SEO - We designed the website architecture to allow for a maximum flow of link equity between the landing pages by creating a good Silo structure through breadcrumbs and internal linking.

We ensured that Google's web crawlers could easily crawl the website by auditing the 404 pages, redirects, internal links, canonical URLs, robots.txt files, and sitemaps.

We avoided keyword cannibalization issues by applying canonical and noindex tags to pages that could have cannibalized the target keywords.
UX - We designed the User Journey and User Interface of the website through a series of live User Tests and observation of user behavior on the website using Hotjar and Google Analytics.

We created landing pages that was optimized for conversion, but also SEO friendly.
On-Page Optimization - We created over 400 location landing pages. We used various data correlation tools to check the exact On-Page data of the top competitors and modelled our On-Page structure according to that data.

This ensured that we were neither under-optimized or over-optimized for the target keywords. We added structured data to every landing page and optimized all the pages with Onpage data-correlation tool, Pageoptimizer Pro, and applied proven-and-tested best practices for optimization to the page.
Content Marketing - We created supporting content targeting top-of-the-funnel keywords for the landing pages. For example, for the Liverpool location page targeting the keyword "self storage Liverpool," we created blog posts to support that page, such as "moving to Liverpool".

The above tactic allowed us to rank the supporting content and funneled the link equity to the target pages via internal links.
Link Building - We executed various white-hat link building strategies such as Guest Posting, Resource Links, Niche Edits, HARO Outreach, Competitor Backlinks outreach, and many more. In a span of 18 months, we built 300 editorial links to the website. The site's Domain Authority reached DR57.

One of our primary tactics was to reverse engineer the outreach strategy of the top competitors. We downloaded their competitor's backlinks profile data, and then reached out to those sites.
GMB Optimization - The client had over 20 Google My Business profiles that weren't ranking in the top 3. We optimized their GMB profiles and built citations to the corresponding location pages on the website.