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Spartan Hunting Lodge, a hog hunting outfit located in Grandview, Tennessee, joined up with Mad Mango Marketing’s SEO team in early 2024 with a unique request. To create a second website for this business and have it compete against their already established website. Normally, an inquiry like this would give us pause as the risk of keyword cannibalization could lead to both sites being worse off by our efforts, but Mad Mango’s history of working with hunting outfitters gave us a different perspective. Yes, typically there is the risk that both sites feel a negative impact for representing the same brand, but on the other hand, the competition for these types of hunts in this area is far less than the average business. There was room for newcoming sites, even if they are competing with themselves. We took on the job knowing that a website built from the ground up with SEO in mind would have a big advantage over the sites that ranked at the time, where there was little to no attention paid to organic growth.
In 2024, Spartan Hunting Lodge averaged 2 leads a day 7 days a week, growing to an average of 3 leads per day and over 6,000 site visitors in the month of December.
The primary step when building a site that would win this showdown was creating great landing pages. Spartan Hunting Lodge offers 4 main hunts; Boar, Fallow Buck, Ram, & Turkey. We created landing pages for each knowing that these would be used to target our primary keywords like “Boar Hunting in Tennessee”. We included this language in headings, body text, and metadata.
Based on working with similar outfitters in the past, we knew that the average users to a site like this wants to see two things, the price and a gallery of images. We placed those as high up on the page as we could. We then tried to utilize video over still images on these pages to create more engagement. In addition to this we added language throughout the middle of the page directing the user to other helpful parts of the website. At the bottom, we finished off these landing pages with one last gallery and contact form next to the hundreds of 5 star reviews they have.
For the rest of the site we kept things simple as the other pages did not have keyword targets but still built out well made Home, Contact, Gallery, Location, & Pricing pages.
Halfway through the year, we were not seeing as much keyword growth as we were used to with other clients, we attributed that to a business decision made by the outfitter to not post as much blog content. While blogging for blogging’s sake is never a strategy, we typically like to cover the FAQs of a landing page with blogs or videos and have seen this help in the past. Without this effort we saw what we expected, slower keyword growth and therefore traffic. We still had to pivot and figure out a way to create some content that ranked. We needed to create content that would not need to be approved and from here decided the next best course of action was location pages. These pages acted as mini home pages highlighting each hunt and the pricing with language throughout referring to that town or city. These one stop shop landing pages for the biggest cities within driving distance of Spartan started to rank in their respective areas, sending local traffic to the site which earned more of Google’s attention and started the keyword explosion we saw mid-year.
Just as the city pages attracting local traffic causes Google to pay more attention to the site, visitors who recall your brand from social media and visit the site at a later date also boost your rankings. It is understood by search engines that sites that get this kind of recalled traffic are remembered for a reason and should be ranked for more. The reason Spartan gets this traffic? Their incredible Facebook pictures. Hunters are one of the groups still very prevalent on Facebook and Spartan Hunting Lodge has an active page with the kind of images that demand to be screenshotted and shared. Creating this kind of shareable content drives direct traffic and helps boost the overall SEO.
The final strategy we hesitate to put in the content section was a Google Ad campaign we managed in addition to the SEO. These ads were directed to our species-specific landing pages which ties it to our content efforts. These ads were critical in the early months as we were able to bring leads without any real rankings to speak of. But as the SEO grew, we saw more and more high quality traffic come to the site from the ads and provide a steady supplement of leads.
As we do with all clients, we start our backlink building with the low hanging fruit of the already established connections the business has, which are typically local. We handled the entire communication process between Spartan and their local network and managed to get a few links placed, showing search engines that we are an authority, referred to by others in the area. After we exhaust the client's list, we then move on to local news sources and pitch them on Spartan. These can come in many forms like podcasts, local magazines or newspapers, or town websites, all of which we earned for this outfitter. Establishing these links early was also a big factor in our mid year bump.
In addition to our strategy above, we worked with a few national and international hunting and outdoor websites to build higher authority links and we did so at a pace of 2-3 per month. With the limited competition as compared to other industries, this rate was just the right number to make an impact and we didn’t miss our deliverables for a single month.
A simple site requires simple maintenance. We kept all plugins up to date, monitored Google Core Web Vitals, and checked in on the site health according to Ahrefs on a weekly basis. If we saw any dips in score, our development team was notified and resolutions were found quickly. If the client had any business changes that required an update to the text on the website, those were emailed over and handled within 24 business hours.
We monitored the competition and any content updates they came out with. Anything ideas that worked for others were brought over to the Spartan site with customization for their brand. Besides that, the only other website updates were a consistent effort was to upload the new images Spartan posts on Facebook each month to the correct gallery on the website. Being such a visual service, the hunting outfitters that maintain large galleries typically tend to perform best.
You can see below the actual traffic in a month from organic visitors alone is almost 2,700 users which dwarfs Ahref’s estimation of 325. This indicates heavy local traffic getting to the site as large enterprise tools are notorious for poor local SEO tracking.
Below you can see the total phone calls and lead form submitted in the year as “All Events” under “Key Events”. SEO or “Organic Search” dominated the traffic category while Paid Search actually brought in more conversions. We associate this with the fact that the SEO didn’t take off until the location pages went up half way through the year. In 2025, we anticipate SEO leads to match the same % difference it brings in traffic.
Early in the campaign, we saw the typical branded terms appear first and that is what you still see today at the top of the keyword list. This is common for most outfitters, and these were the majority of the terms for the first few months. We were able to get a few keywords from the generic guides we wrote in the blog section for each species but not much moved. Around August we saw a culmination of the efforts on the landing pages, guides, ads, and social posting and the species pages we originally envisioned ranking began to come to life. For the first time, the Hog Hunting page ranked for terms without the brand name and with the intent to book a hunt behind them. This is when the leads really became consistent.
Without the approval to post consistent content, we don’t see this site becoming one that ranks for thousands of keywords but for now, the strategy of monthly image updates, a yearly blog per species, and backlink building seem to be enough to get quality keywords onto page 1.
By the end of the year, our site was the best performer and we won the battle between the two websites. We look forward to continuing to grow this business with the team at Spartan Hunting Lodge and other outfitters outside of their territory who are interested in our services. By focusing on well-crafted landing pages, engaging social media content, and consistent backlink building, the website saw significant growth in leads, organic traffic, and keyword rankings. The integration of SEO with Google Ads campaigns and careful monitoring of website health and updates also played a crucial role in surpassing initial expectations. Moving forward into 2025, the foundation laid in the first year promises even greater success as SEO efforts are expected to yield higher conversions comparable to those from paid searches. This case study exemplifies how unconventional strategies can lead to exceptional outcomes in SEO.
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