Our Strategy
Texans in the state’s deregulated areas can choose from more than 100 retail electricity providers, and many shoppers compare plans by searching for options in their city or county. In May 2024, Google started answering more of those searches with AI Overviews, which tend to cite pages that already rank well and answer questions clearly. This provider had untapped visibility in both: organic search brought in only 19% of new site visitors, and a misapplied code setting was keeping 41 pages out of Google’s index, which also kept them out of AI Overviews.
We started by clearing the indexing issues, linking 14 isolated pages back into the site, and consolidating pages that were competing for the same keywords. With that foundation in place, we built the keyword strategy around how Texans compare electricity plans, mapping location-specific terms for priority markets like Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth area to the best-positioned pages.
Content-wise, we published five articles a month on the questions Texas residents ask while weighing a switch, from how much electricity an oven uses to how two major Texas cities compare on cost of living. Each article answered its target question directly beneath the relevant heading, earning featured snippets and giving AI Overviews a clear answer to pull from. We applied the same structure to existing high-traffic guides and added Article schema describing each page in searchers’ own terms. Seasonal topics like AC maintenance and energy conservation went live ahead of summer demand peaks. More than 400 backlinks from relevant sites strengthened the campaign pages, and as visibility grew, we kept shifting the keyword strategy toward more competitive terms.
The Results
In 12 months, organic search became the provider’s largest source of new site visitors. New organic users grew 505%, from 90,617 to 548,321, and organic search’s share of all new users increased from 19% to 60%. Organic users reached 563,653, nearly triple the campaign goal of 193,304.
Top-3 keyword rankings grew 193%, from 1,063 to 3,110, almost double the target of 1,595. Top-10 rankings nearly doubled, too, and referring domains grew 211%, from 510 to 1,585. By the end of the campaign, the provider was cited as a source in 1,648 AI Overviews.
