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Case study, published with permission
Zero keywords in the top three. What moved, what did not, and why.
Most agency case studies show you the wins and stop. This one shows the biggest target I have still not hit, and the reason it is not hit. If that is not what you expected from a case study, it is the most useful thing on this site.
Where it started
On 21 April 2026, Lucca Transportation ranked in positions one to three for exactly zero keywords. Nine keywords sat anywhere in the top twenty. The site had plenty of content and almost no visibility, which is the normal condition of a chauffeur company that has been publishing without a structure.
| Position band | Keywords, 21 April 2026 |
|---|---|
| 1 to 3 | 0 |
| 4 to 10 | 7 |
| 11 to 20 | 2 |
| 21 to 50 | 7 |
Source: the client's own Ahrefs organic keyword history, exported on the audit date.
What the audit found
Four problems, none of them hidden, all of them sitting in tools the business already had access to.
- Fourteen thin airport posts were cannibalising each other. All targeting the same primary term, so Google ranked none of them well. The homepage sat at position 14 for the term the business is built on
- Fort Lauderdale had three separate pages. None of them ranked
- The luxury and executive ad group had never run. Zero spend, zero impressions, across months. The highest-margin service in the business had marketing on paper and nothing live
- Bid adjustments were backwards. The 55 to 64 segment, converting at 23 percent, carried a minus 90 percent adjustment. Conversion tracking was broken, so the account was optimising toward clicks rather than bookings
What I did
Structure first, then the ad account, then speed. No new content was published to fix the cannibalisation, because the problem was never a shortage of content.
- Consolidated fourteen airport pages into one with exact-match 301 redirects
- Merged Fort Lauderdale's three competing pages into a single page
- Consolidated the duplicate hourly and Sprinter pages
- Deindexed ten off-topic pages diluting topical authority
- Rebuilt fourteen city pages from the ground up
- Built new service pages for prom, corporate car service and event group transport
- Rewrote the airport, wedding and bachelorette pages
- Implemented Google Ads conversion tracking, which the account had been running without
- Removed the suppressive bid adjustments
- Rebuilt and launched the luxury and executive ad group
- Added negative keywords to stop budget leaking to rideshare and taxi comparison terms
- Rebuilt the site's caching and asset loading
All of it executed personally. No subcontractors, and nothing handed back to the client to implement.
What moved
From zero keywords in the top three, Lucca now holds position five or better on several commercial terms. Every position below was pulled on 8 September 2026 and can be checked in about ten seconds.
| Keyword | Monthly volume | Position today |
|---|---|---|
| sprinter van rental west palm beach | 50 | 5 |
| limo services in stuart florida | 50 | 5 |
| west palm beach to fort lauderdale cruise port | 30 | 5 |
| limo service stuart fl | 50 | 6 |
| jupiter limo service | 70 | 7 |
On the Sprinter term, Lucca now sits above Turo, Outdoorsy, Yelp and Budget. That one is worth noting because it is a page the consolidation work was meant to protect, and it held.
Source: live SERP pull, 8 September 2026. The Sprinter position was verified against the rendered results page rather than taken from a database.
The site also got materially faster
Measured before and after on 23 August 2026 with three Lighthouse runs per page. This one matters commercially because page experience feeds ranking, so a heavy site caps what you can win before anyone reads a word of the copy.
| Homepage | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Lighthouse performance | 74 to 77 | 91 to 96 |
| First Contentful Paint | 2.7s | 1.9s |
| Cumulative Layout Shift | 0.219 | 0.000 |
| Page weight | 738 KB | 454 KB |
The airport page moved similarly: layout shift from 0.543 to 0.011, and page weight from 843 KB to 572 KB.
What did not work
"limo service west palm beach" was the single biggest target in the plan. Two hundred and sixty searches a month, the term the whole business is named around. As of 8 September 2026, Lucca does not appear in the top seventeen organic results, and does not appear in the local pack either.
Why it has not happened yet
Page one is held by a mix of operators and aggregators: a1alimo, price4limo, palmbeachlimoandcarservices, Yelp, parklimo and Sixt. Beating directory sites on a commercial local term is slow work.
The local pack is the harder problem, and it is worth being specific about why. The three businesses holding it carry 174, 217 and roughly 2,000 reviews. Local pack position is heavily review-driven, and Lucca cannot close a gap like that quickly. I do not run review generation campaigns, because incentivised reviews breach platform policy and risk the profile, so this is a limitation of how I work rather than something I can simply spend my way out of.
The consolidation redirects went live on 24 June. A report eleven days later showed the term had gone backwards, which was expected, because Google needs weeks to reconsolidate authority after redirects. Eleven weeks on, several other terms have clearly settled and improved. This one has not.
I am publishing this because you are going to ask about it eventually, and finding out from me now is better for both of us than finding out in month four.
How to read these numbers
The honest methodology caveat
The April baseline comes from Ahrefs. An interim check in July used Google Search Console average position. Today's positions come from a live SERP pull. Those three tools count keywords differently and measure position differently.
So there is no single "went from X to Y" number anywhere on this page, and there should not be. What you get instead is a same-source baseline (zero keywords in the top three, from the client's own Ahrefs export), and same-source current positions that you can verify yourself right now by searching.
Composite before and after figures assembled from mismatched tools are how marketing case studies usually manufacture impressive numbers. I would rather show you fewer numbers that hold.
Not published here: revenue, booking volume and pricing. Permission to be named in a case study is not permission to publish a client's finances.
What I would tell you if you were Lucca on day one
Fix the structure before publishing anything, expect the map pack to be the slowest thing to move, and start collecting reviews properly from day one through your own follow-up, because that is the constraint nobody can shortcut for you.
The work that produced results here was almost all subtraction: consolidating, redirecting, deindexing, removing bad bid adjustments, cutting page weight. Very little of it was publishing more.
That is the usual shape of it in this industry, and it is the reason the free week starts with an audit rather than a content calendar.
See what the same audit finds in yours
35 posts across five platforms over seven days, on your own accounts, in your branding. No credit card, and the audit comes with it.