The Challenge

Pickleheads had a strategic vision to leverage organic search and elevate their brand's visibility, aiming for dominance in "Pickleball Near Me" queries. Recognizing the role of authority in search rankings, they prioritized enhancing their backlink profile with GR0's help and guidance. Employing HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and various other backlinking strategies within our publisher network, we successfully secured over 140 natural backlinks. Pickleheads actively pursued links through HARO, too, furthering their backlinking efforts. They directed efforts towards expanding their scheduler page, aligned with their mobile app, envisioning themselves as the go-to facilitator for spontaneous games at any time.‍

The Strategy

The majority of our campaign focused on acquiring branded links. This is crucial for brand authority and recognition, as well as higher search engine rankings and increased traffic. In the final months, we added SEO consultation services as well. This allowed us to ensure the site's top technical performance. We fixed numerous broken links, offered guidance on orphan links, and provided metadata corrections for issues like long titles, extensive meta descriptions, and missing meta descriptions. We identified key pages that were not visible in the sitemap, hindering their chances of being regularly crawled.

Examples

Addressing issues with top-priority pages not appearing due to canonicalization errors was a focus. For example, pages like “How to Play Pickleball” had canonical tags that limited their visibility. We discovered that https://www.pickleheads.com/courts/ca was canonicalized to https://www.pickleheads.com/courts/us, significantly reducing the visibility of Canadian pickleball courts. This was an important find and had to be fixed‍

We identified that the “Scheduler” page was canonicalized to “Sessions,” making “Sessions” the page Google ranked while displaying “Scheduler.” Correcting this issue quickly led to the page reaching the #2 spot in search results within days, where they had never ranked before. A huge win on our part to help Pickleheads reach their goal!

Proven Success

We are incredibly proud of successfully increasing Pickleheads domain rating from 22 to 60 in just 14 months! This was an impressively fast climb and this achievement alone transformed their site into an authoritative powerhouse for pickleball-related queries‍

The Pickleheads team was an extremely knowledgeable group of people who knew exactly what they wanted. Working with them was wonderful! They were receptive, worked with us side by side, and undeniably played a significant role in their own growth as well. We always enjoy working closely with our clients, and this teamwork led to better results than we even imagined!‍