Craters & Freighters Boston is a specialty crating, packaging and shipping company working out of Holliston, serving Massachusetts and greater New England. This is what a year of SEO did to where they show up in Google — and why that matters before the lead numbers move.
The ask
This is hazmat-certified commercial and industrial work: machinery and robotics, medical and laboratory equipment, manufacturing and plant relocation, and on-site crating for equipment too large or too fragile to move before it is packed. A single job can be worth thousands. The business does not need volume. It needs to be found by the small number of people each month who have that specific, expensive problem.
A year ago it was not being found by them. The site’s average position across all Google searches was 45 — page five. It was shown 140,000 times over twelve months and clicked 511 times, a click-through rate of 0.36%. Page five is functionally the same as not being there at all.
What we changed
- Built pages for services that had none. On-site crating and robotics crating and shipping — real, high-margin capabilities with no content behind them.
- Rewrote the packaging set. Heat shrink wrapping, vapor barrier packaging and the packaging services hub, all of which were thin and ranking accordingly.
- Rebuilt internal linking with exact-match anchors pointing at the crating hub, the quote page and the industrial packaging pages, so the site’s own authority reached the pages meant to earn the work.
- Wrote the crating pages for answer engines. ISPM-15 and MIL-SPEC compliance set out as factual, bulleted specifications — the format AI models actually lift when they answer a question directly.
- Kept the Google Business Profile current, so local and map searches across the service area surface the location.
What the numbers said
Google Search Console, the twelve months to 31 August 2026 against the twelve months before it.
Moving a whole site’s average position from 45 to 21 is the difference between page five and page two. It is not the finish line, but it is the thing that has to happen first — and it is why clicks more than doubled while the number of searches the site appeared in rose only 31%. Much the same audience started actually seeing them.
Page by page
| Page | Before | After | Positions gained |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contact page | 43 | 12 | +31 |
| Homepage, all queries | 39 | 17 | +22 |
| Shipping services hub | 41 | 20 | +21 |
| Heat shrink wrapping | 55 | 36 | +19 |
| Corrugated packaging | 36 | 20 | +16 |
| Hazmat shipping | 33 | 24 | +9 |
The click growth followed the same shape. The homepage went from 224 clicks to 605. Hazmat shipping went from 23 to 60. Corrugated packaging — a straightforward commercial line with almost no visibility a year ago — went from 10 to 28.
Where that lands today
Search Console reports where a site appeared for the searches it actually received, which skews local. So these positions were checked a second way, in a national ranking tool, with no local weighting at all:
| Search term | Position |
|---|---|
| Custom pallets & skids | 1 |
| Crating and shipping services in Boston | 2 |
| Shipping companies in Boston MA | 7 |
| Corrugated boxes Boston | 8 |
| Shipping companies in Boston | 8 |
| Boston shipping | 9 |
The channel nobody is watching yet
The fastest-converting traffic on this site now comes from AI assistants. It is small — a few dozen sessions a quarter — but it converts at roughly 30%, ahead of organic search, paid search and direct. That is not an accident. It is why the crating pages carry factual, bulleted specification lists rather than paragraphs of prose: when an answer engine is asked who can crate a robot to ISPM-15 standard in Massachusetts, it needs something it can lift.
Where it stands
Worth saying plainly: this is a ranking story, not yet a lead story. Total organic sessions have not grown. Specialty crating is a small search market, and moving from position 45 to position 21 mostly buys the right to be seen at all — page two is not page one.
The work now is pushing the terms already sitting between 11 and 20 onto page one, where the clicks actually are, and converting the visibility that already exists into quote requests. That is a shorter distance to travel than the one already covered.
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