The short version: Craters & Freighters Boston crates, packs and ships commercial and industrial equipment from Holliston, Massachusetts. In twelve months, clicks from Google to the Boston site rose 143%, from 511 to 1,242, and quote requests from organic search rose 24%. Today it ranks #1 in the Boston area for crating companies and crating and shipping services, and visitors sent by AI tools such as ChatGPT nearly doubled.
The ask
Boston’s best work is commercial and industrial: machinery and robotics, medical and laboratory equipment, manufacturing and plant relocations, and on-site crating for equipment too large or too delicate to move before it’s packed. These are high-value jobs, and the companies that need them search for exactly that. The goal was simple: when those buyers search, they should find Boston.
A year ago, most of them didn’t. In the twelve months to August 2025, Google showed the site about 140,000 times, and people clicked through just 511 times.
What we changed
- Built pages for services that had none. On-site crating and robotics crating and shipping, both real, high-value capabilities with nothing on the site behind them, went live in May 2026.
- Rewrote the packaging pages. Heat shrink wrapping, vapor barrier packaging and the packaging services hub were thin and ranking that way. All three were rewritten in August 2026.
- Rebuilt internal linking. Links across the site now point at the crating hub, the quote page and the industrial packaging pages, so the site’s own authority flows to the pages meant to win the work.
- Wrote the crating pages for AI answers. ISPM-15 and MIL-SPEC compliance are set out as clear, factual specification lists, the format AI tools 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 August 31, 2026 against the twelve months before; Google Analytics 4; Semrush position tracking for the Boston area. Google changed how it reports search data in September 2025, which lowered impressions for most sites, so the 31% gain is, if anything, understated. For the same reason we’ve left out site-wide average position and click-through rate: that change makes both look better than they really are.
Clicks more than doubled while the number of times Google showed the site rose 31%. Much the same audience started choosing Boston. The homepage went from 224 clicks to 605, and the contact page from 17 to 47.
Search by search
Here’s how often Google showed the site for key commercial searches, and where it ranked, at the end of 2025 versus the third quarter of 2026.
| Search term | Times shown, Oct–Dec 2025 | Times shown, Jul–Sep 2026 | Avg. position, Oct–Dec 2025 | Avg. position, Jul–Sep 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| crating companies | 242 | 366 | 8 | 3 |
| crating and shipping | 268 | 362 | 15 | 4 |
| crating near me | 81 | 185 | 5 | 2 |
| shipping and crating | 163 | 101 | 15 | 5 |
| custom pallets & skids | 0 | 91 | Not shown | 3 |
| shrink wrapping services | 230 | 91 | 21 | 11 |
| medical equipment shipping | 4 | 64 | 61 | 12 |
| medical equipment shipping services | 15 | 52 | 86 | 10 |
| freight shipping service | 4 | 48 | 52 | 13 |
Where that lands today
Search Console averages a site’s position across every search where it appeared, from anywhere. So these positions were checked a second way, with a rank tracker that checks Google results as a searcher in the Boston area sees them:
| Search term | Position in Boston |
|---|---|
| Crating and shipping services | 1 |
| Crating companies | 1 |
| Custom crates near me | 1 |
| Custom pallets & skids | 1 |
| Onsite crating | 2 |
| Production crating | 5 |
| Crating company | 6 |
| Crating services near me | 8 |
| Medical equipment shipping | 10 |
The channel everyone knows about, but few are tracking yet
Visitors sent by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Copilot rose from 68 to 126 (January–September 2026 vs the same months of 2025), and their lead actions from 15 to 39. They take a lead action 31% of the time, ahead of visitors from Google’s regular results at 20% (Google Analytics 4). Some of that rise is simply more people using AI tools. What a business can influence is whether those tools find something worth quoting.
That’s why the crating pages carry factual specification lists rather than paragraphs of prose. When someone asks an AI tool who can crate a robot to ISPM-15 standard in Massachusetts, it needs a clear answer it can lift, and the Boston site now gives it one.
Where it stands
Leads are following the clicks, more slowly. Quote requests from organic search rose 24% (264 vs 213) and phone-number clicks 26% (68 vs 54), while total visits from organic search held about level (U.S. visitors, Google Analytics 4, the same twelve-month windows). Specialty crating is a small search market, and many of Boston’s commercial and industrial searches still sit on Google’s second page.
Page one is the goal, and the trend is moving in the right direction. SEO and AI search take time: rankings build month over month as Google and AI tools learn to trust a site. Next, we’re focused on moving those page-two searches up and turning the visibility Boston already has into quote requests.
Questions franchise owners ask us
What did The Great Online change on the Boston site?
We built pages for commercial and industrial services that had none, including on-site crating and robotics crating and shipping, rewrote the thin packaging pages, rebuilt internal linking toward the pages that win quotes, and wrote the crating pages as clear, factual specifications that Google and AI tools can quote.
Is Boston getting more leads from search?
Yes, though more slowly than clicks. Quote requests from organic search rose 24% year over year, from 213 to 264, and phone-number clicks rose from 54 to 68. Visitors sent by AI tools take a lead action 31% of the time. The next step is turning more of Boston’s new visibility into quote requests.
Want results like this for your business?
We do this for all kinds of businesses, from single-location companies to national brands and franchise networks. See our SEO and AI search services, how we approach AI search optimization, and franchise SEO for multi-location brands. Read the Craters & Freighters national site, Chicago, Pensacola and Tampa case studies. Then ask us to look at your numbers.
