Seven Years, One Domain, and 10x the Traffic Growth for BigRentz

• 10:1 on net new organic traffic in 2022, against an agency that had been publishing on the blog for two years before we were.
• Our share of total blog traffic grew from 23% to 35% in a single year, while the rest of the blog’s traffic declined.
• Our content grew through every major Google update, especially the December 2022 Helpful Content Update.
• By January 2024, a single post we’d produced drove more monthly conversions than every other piece of content on the blog combined.

BigRentz hired us for link building in 2017, when the company was only five years old and the site’s Domain Rating was a meager 31. In late 2018, the site’s Domain Rating had grown to 61 and they were positioned for more rapid organic growth. They brought in the largest content marketing agency in SEO to handle that side of the strategy.

Two years later, in late 2020, they asked if we’d take on some of the content work alongside our existing link-building efforts. What followed was unusual. For the next three years, two agencies worked the same blog at the same time. Our content was tracked separately and reported on each month, so the comparison stayed clean. Honestly, it’s about as close to a head-to-head test as this industry ever gives you, and here’s what we found.

When we first started working with BigRentz, content wasn’t part of the conversation. We were hired for link building and we built links the white-hat way, which wasn’t the dominant approach at the time.

Across the industry in 2017, links were mostly generated through payment, guest post networks, and private blog networks. The reason wasn’t that agencies didn’t know better. It was the margin. We chose the slow work anyway, and it paid off as BigRentz’s Domain Rating climbed from the mid-30s into the 70s over the course of the engagement, positioning them as a genuine competitor in the space.

By late 2020, impressed by the quality of our link-building work, BigRentz asked us to assist with organic growth. And the authority that link-building work laid down eventually compounded the content results in ways neither side of the engagement could have predicted at the time.

Two agencies with very different operating models produced content for BigRentz over a similar period. The agency that began content work before us was a well-respected shop and the content they produced was solid.

The differences that emerged between their work and ours had nothing to do with talent or how seriously either team took the engagement. They were a product of company structure, particularly the difference between how a 100-plus person agency has to run versus how a small one chooses to.

A large operation requires a standardized process, typically supported by junior employees. In comparison, we’re intentionally small and both strategy and content gets senior attention from start to finish. This allowed our team to dig deep and surface less obvious, but high impact opportunities.

This was important due to the site’s already wide topical coverage when we began the engagement. By late 2020, obvious heavy-equipment keywords and broad top-of-funnel keywords had already been targeted. So we took a different approach.

We targeted niche, high-intent queries like dumpster rental prices, porta potty rental cost, equipment to clear land, generator amperage chart, and Bobcat serial number lookup. They were the kind of searches that people close to a rental decision made.

Most of these keywords had modest search volumes, but attracted the right audience. A keyword pulling 200 buyer-intent searches a month is worth more to a business than one pulling 20,000 from people who have no commercial interest. We were building content with the customer in mind, knowing that the dashboard metrics would look less impressive in the short term, but that conversion data would tell the real story over time.

By the time we joined the content engagement, the incumbent’s content library was substantial. That gap in volume held for the duration of the engagement. We never caught up on raw output. However, we did make an outsized impact on both traffic and conversion growth.

In January 2022, our content was pulling 49,982 monthly organic unique pageviews. By December of that same year, it was up to 77,117 — a 54% gain in twelve months. The rest of the blog grew by fewer than 5,000 monthly visits over the same window.

The cleanest comparison was net new clicks. Looking at the last 28 days of 2022 against the year-prior window, Google Search Console showed that our content had gained nearly 25,000 net new clicks year over year, while other content had gained around 2,500 over that same period. That’s ten times the year-over-year growth.

By the end of 2022, our content was driving 35% of the blog’s organic traffic, up from 23% at the start of the year. Even more important, traffic was converting. In June 2022, 16 of our posts were driving measurable goal completions on the site, including Porta Potty Rental Cost with 20 click-to-call actions per month.

Why? Because we were targeting questions and solutions terms that targeted people who may need an equipment rental. For example, Bobcat Serial Number Lookup — people running that search may have an issue with their current machine. That’s not browse-and-leave traffic. That’s the traffic of someone who may be one or two steps away from renting equipment, and who wants help right now.

This kind of result wasn’t a lucky outlier on a low-competition keyword. The same approach eventually scaled into a conversion engine.

Looking back at 2022, the more revealing story is what was happening to the rest of the blog while our content was growing.

Our content went from 49,982 monthly unique pageviews in January 2022 to 77,117 in December, a gain of roughly 27,000 visits. The blog as a whole gained fewer than 5,000 in the same window, meaning that the rest of the blog was net down by roughly 22,000 monthly visits over the year, even while ours was climbing.

What made this meaningful was that our content came out of Helpful Content Updates (August 2022 and December 2022) unscathed. Google’s stated goal with the HCU was to push down content that had been created primarily for search engines rather than human readers, and to reward content that helps and informs people.

Overall, the blog took a sharp drop starting around December 18. Recovery began in early January. By the time the dust settled in late January, our content was sitting 1.6% above its November levels and essentially unaffected by the update. The rest of the blog had a much longer recovery curve. As late as October 2023 — ten months after the December rollout — total blog traffic had only just clawed back to where it had been in November 2022 (up 2.3% year over year). In the same month, our content was up 34% year over year.

We saw the same pattern in every major Google update that came after. The March 2023 core update lifted our content by 26% and the rest of the blog by 14%. The August 2023 core update lifted ours by 11% and the rest by 6.8%. Every Google update through 2024 widened the gap further in the direction of the work that had been written for readers.

By January 2024, a single post we’d produced was driving more monthly conversions than every other piece of content on the BigRentz blog combined.

That post was Dumpster Rental Prices. It was written in 2021, lost traffic during a SERP feature shift in mid-2023, and was revamped by our team in the second half of that year. By January 2024, it was outperforming its original peak with 98 conversions in the month, which worked out to about 36% of all content-attributed conversions across the entire BigRentz blog.

That one page is the headline result, but it’s part of a longer conversion story that took three years to build. In June 2022, 16 of our posts were already driving goal completions. By mid-2023, that number had roughly doubled, with 28 posts contributing. By October 2023, 39 of our posts were driving conversions in a given month. And by January 2024, our content was producing 156 add-to-cart conversions, 29 lead generation conversions, 26 purchases, and 59 click-to-call conversions in a single month.

This is what a good content strategy looks like. The pages rank because they answer the query better than the alternatives in the SERP, and that same quality of answer is what drives the conversion once a reader actually lands on the page.

In a category like heavy equipment rental, the ROI for content that produces leads and conversions is strong. A single click-to-call from a contractor can turn into a multi-day excavator rental. Quote requests have a way of becoming week-long dumpster bookings. And the average add-to-cart often ends up as part of a project-scale equipment order. Each of those outcomes is worth hundreds of dollars in revenue to BigRentz, and sometimes thousands. One strong month of conversions from a single NSI page can pay for a year of content investment on its own.

A few things stood out when we looked back at what the work actually surfaced.

Earned authority compounded. A link earned from a real journalist in 2018 was still passing authority through the engagement years later. A page we’d written for readers in 2021 was still ranking number one in 2024, because it was still the best available answer to the query someone was running.

Additionally, our content produced 10x the net new organic traffic the larger agency did. By early 2024, one of our posts was producing more monthly conversions than every other piece on the blog combined.

Quality work holds up against algorithm changes in a way that scaled production doesn’t. Every major Google update through 2024 widened the gap between content that earns its rankings and content that doesn’t. We were on the right side of every one of those updates.

That’s the thesis North Star Inbound was built on, and BigRentz is the seven-year version of what it looks like in practice.