Gallagher Uniform
SEO Case Study
10% Annual Sales Growth for 12 Consecutive Years with a 99% Customer Retention Rate
Increase in total web visitors
Increase in organic visitors
Direct visitor increase
8-Year Update Brings Continued Growth and Momentum
Since our partnership with Gallagher Uniform began, the company has continued to see steady, meaningful growth. With a long-term focus on digital marketing and customer communication, Gallagher remains on track with key business goals.
Customer Retention & Sales Growth
Gallagher has maintained a strong 99% customer retention rate and continues to grow, with 10%+ annual sales growth for the past 12 years. These numbers reflect the strength of their service model and the consistency of their customer relationships.
New Accounts and Industry Growth
With marketing support, Gallagher has added new key accounts—most notably a food processing company with over 80 uniform wearers that moved from a national provider to Gallagher. They’ve also gained more traction in food processing and Tier 1 automotive, two areas of ongoing focus.
Stronger Brand Presence
Marketing efforts, especially through social media, have helped Gallagher share more of their company culture and values with both customers and prospects. This has supported a stronger brand presence and built more trust in the marketplace.
Email Campaign Results
A recent prospecting email to agricultural businesses saw a 40.8% open rate, well above the B2B industry average of 15.14%. It’s a small example of how targeted messaging continues to support Gallagher’s outreach efforts.
Background and History
Our President, Rebecca Dutcher, worked to develop the current Gallagher Uniform website in 2013 while working for a different agency. The website hadn’t had many updates in terms of content, especially SEO-focused content, for several years.
Our team became engaged with Gallagher Uniform again in 2016 to focus on SEO/SEM and lead generation through the website, where we worked diligently to build a hub that would promote progression and sales.
The Problem
Business was going well for Gallagher. Still, they were looking to increase the volume of their sales without adding many additional salespeople. They needed a website refresh as well as concentrated efforts on their content marketing.
As a B2B supplier, Gallagher Uniform needed to reach local companies in search of their next uniform rental company.
Insights
The first step in this project was conducting an audit of the website to identify opportunities to improve all on-page SEO elements. We engaged in keyword research and competitor analysis, and we used those insights to fuel a new structure for the website.
This also informed what type of content to include in their blog, social media marketing, online advertising, and what topics to marry so that we could best reach prospective customers.
Digital marketing is not a silo. The company also invested in local print advertising, truck wraps, and graphics, along with strengthening its sales, customer service, and route service teams.
Our agency provided graphic design and messaging to keep digital and traditional deliverables consistent.
The Solution
First, we developed and implemented a calculated SEO strategy and calendar to support additional optimization for key products and services on the current website. It was a strong website with a great structure where some updates, improvements, and new content would deliver results.
Additionally, paid search text and display ads—including retargeting ads—were expanded in late 2018 to build more brand awareness in Gallagher’s growing service areas.
Over the past two years, we have also consistently added fresh content, created supplementary landing pages for local SEO and paid search efforts, and identified further opportunities for continued growth and traffic improvements.
As search engines and search engine marketing have changed significantly in recent years, we outlined an updated site structure for a new Gallagher Uniform website launched in Summer 2019. The updated website construction better utilized keyword clustering and reduced page count.
This new site structure creates pages that are more specific to the search opportunity for which key buyer personas are looking for.
The Results
We succeeded in our goal to generate more relevant website traffic, leads, and, ultimately sales for the company. Website traffic nearly doubled, year over year, adding 81% new users, and 40% of website growth is through organic search.
Gallagher also saw significant growth in their sales. Their stretch FY2018 sales goal was exceeded by $300,000. This was achieved by bringing and retaining a mix of over 100 customers.
Conclusion and Moving Forward
Our ongoing work with Gallagher Uniform has an additional focus on customer retention through specified content, emphasizing retargeting ads for brand building. We will turn efforts to email marketing automation to streamline customer retention.
Additionally, a new website was launched at the end of June 2019. This new website adopts a fresher design, improved user experience, and strong SEO foundation as described above.
Testimonial
“When companies call us, they already know all about us from finding and visiting our website. We get to the table and it’s a completely different conversation, and our sales cycles are much shorter.”
John Gallagher, President of Gallagher Uniform