Do Top Google Local Rankings Equal High Sales?
As a business development firm as well as a Denver SEO we get to look at all sorts of data. One of the reports we run shows all of the Denver Metro Area construction permits issued over a period of time. We use this to help guide marketing efforts for clients.
I thought it would be interesting to compare the top ranked basement finishing companies on Google to the rankings of basement finishing companies by number of sales in Denver over the last three months. If top Google rankings for important (highly searched) keywords are valuable in selling more, then they should show up very high on number of basements sold. 
Clearly this is a correlation, not causation, and we are only working with one type search-
“Denver Basement Finishing”. We are not looking at location based searches and rankings, like setting our browser to a suburb and searching “basement finishing”. We can however with relative confidence say that the top ranked sites we see are very well ranked in the other search types for local. Those being: just the keyword, keyword plus suburb, keyword + zip.
Here is the screen shot of the search “Basement Finishing Denver”
So the top Three Google ranked sites under this search are:
Finished Basement Company
Basements and Beyond
Elkstone Basements
How does this stack up to the number of Permits issued for basement finishing in the Denver Metro Area from June 1st, 2012 through 8-20-12?
Top Sales of Basements in Denver
1.) Elkstone Basements with 15
2.) Finished Basement Company 09
3.) Tie. Finished Basement Company 05 and two others. (The Basement Company and RS Master Builders).
There are 258 total basement Permits listed from Contractors. These three companies sold 31 of those or 12% of the total. There are 174 different contractors on the report, these three only represent 1.7 % of all the companies on the report. The average contractor sold 1.4 basements. The top three in the Google results sold an average of 9.7 basements. That is 7 times as many as the average.
You can see the data we used at the bottom of this blog. Raw data sorted by Company name. You can pull this information from the www.constructionmonitor.com (not sure if you need a membership or not)
It also is noteworthy that Elkstone Basements (a client) does Pay Per Click on Google. We didn’t see the other top two in the Pay Per Click ads.
There are many other factors that could influence a basement finishing company’s sales. Some of those being other marketing they do, number of referrals they receive, competitiveness of their pricing, their sales process, and people just seeing their trucks!
But there is no question there is a very strong relationship between high Google Rankings and High Sales.
A note on the data: We removed home builders who had a basement permit, as these appear to be new construction sales and not in the same category as the others.
Here is the spread sheet info after sorting. Each time the company is named it represents a permit being approved for a basement. See it on Google Docs https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en&hl=en&key=0AhMCsU1ItecOdE5yNlg3M0kyY0dpOW5DbVpMY1lwQXc&output=html
Wouldn’t it be great if we had access to this type information for all types of business? We could make a strong case that web visibility provides a very strong return on investment, and in the world of SEO and Marketing, that is a case we are consistently trying to make.
Feel free to call me if we can help you with your Business development. 303 500 3053 . We work with Contractors, SEO’s, Web Design Firms, and Just about every type small company you can imagine!
