Craters & Freighters Tampa is a specialty crating, packaging and freight company serving the Tampa Bay region. This is what a year of SEO did to their numbers, and how we got there.
I’m a numbers guy. If you show me this is working, I’ll keep doing it.
Dave Amos, Owner, Craters & Freighters Tampa
The ask
This is a business where a single job can be worth thousands of dollars — crating an aerospace component, relocating a production line, packing a medical imaging unit for freight. It does not live on volume. It lives on being found by the handful of people each month who have that specific, expensive problem.
A year earlier, the site was not being found by those people. It ranked like a general moving company, because that is what its content looked like to Google. The owner wanted proof that changing it was worth the money.
What we changed
- Repositioned the site around industrial work. Built and optimized dedicated pages for defense and military packaging, aerospace crating, medical equipment shipping, hazmat and plant relocation — high-margin services that had almost no content behind them.
- Kept the high-value residential work. Grandfather clocks, estate and antique shipping, senior moves and white glove delivery stayed in the plan. They convert well and rose alongside everything else.
- Fixed the local signals. Google Business Profile, citations and Tampa-specific content, so “near me” searches in their service area actually surface them.
- Published every month. Consistent new and refreshed content is what compounds. There is no version of this that works as a single push.
What the numbers said
Traffic is the easy number to move. What matters is what the traffic does once it lands — and across a quarter of US sessions, organic search out-converted every other channel on the site, paid included.
| Channel | Sessions | Engaged time | Key events | Conversion rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic search | 798 | 57.1s | 120 | 13.91% |
| Paid search | 869 | 46.9s | 94 | 10.81% |
| Direct | 705 | 14.8s | 31 | 4.40% |
| Paid social | 5,876 | 2.8s | 7 | 0.10% |
Organic brought in fewer sessions than paid search and produced more completed actions, because someone who types “aerospace crating” into Google has already qualified themselves.
Paid social is the outlier in that table, and it is worth reading fairly. For a business like this one it runs as a branding exercise rather than a lead channel — it puts the name in front of a broad audience, and a 0.10% conversion rate is what that job looks like in an analytics report. It is not a like-for-like comparison with search, where the customer arrived already looking for you.
Rankings on the terms that carry margin
The strategy deliberately moved this location away from generic moving-company searches and toward industrial and commercial work: defense, aerospace, medical equipment, corporate relocation.
| Search term | Before | After | Positions gained |
|---|---|---|---|
| Military & defense packaging | 23 | 1 | +22 |
| Aerospace crating | 32 | 18 | +14 |
| Senior movers | 37 | 12 | +25 |
| Medical equipment shipping | 92 | 40 | +52 |
| Corporate relocation, Tampa | 82 | 54 | +28 |
| Homepage, all US queries | 43 | 15 | +28 |
- Corrugated packaging — impressions 221 to 960, average position 42 to 29
- Grandfather clock shipping — average position 60 to 25
- Heat shrink wrapping — average position 62 to 53
Worth saying plainly: click volume here is still modest in absolute terms. This is a specialized local market where total search volume is small. The wins are position and qualified lead volume, not raw traffic — the right trade for a business whose average job is worth what theirs is.
You had me from the first page.
Dave Amos, on seeing the results
Where it stands
The program continues. The current focus is conversion — now that the right people are landing on the right pages, the work is making sure more of them pick up the phone — alongside continued expansion into the industrial keyword set.
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