Overview
Full marketing site for SVM covering residential, commercial, senior, and specialty moves, plus FF&E services and warehouse storage. Built on Next.js with Fillout for lead capture and Google Tag Manager for analytics.
Challenge
The old SVM website averaged 3-4 organic clicks per day, ranked at position 24.5 on average (pages 2 and 3 of Google), and ran 251 URLs of mostly low-quality content built by an agency that had also quietly spun up a clone domain at sanjosemovers1.com using a different phone number, which absorbed 291 of SVM's 491 backlinks (59%) and was likely siphoning leads. Direct competitors had 411, 260, and 115 indexed pages versus SVM's 19. Worse, the brand story was buried. Joe and Cheri Childs founded SVM together in 1990, Joe personally won Bekins 2024 Driver of the Year, and the company is a four-consecutive-year Spire Award winner (2021 through 2024), yet the site said only 'award-winning' and hid the family entirely. For a 36-year family-owned San Jose mover, the gap between the brand reality and the digital presence was the entire problem.
Approach
Full Next.js 16 rebuild on Vercel, 19 routes to ~90 routes. Migration safety first: 20 redirect rules covering 139 old sitemap URLs with Ahrefs-verified backlink preservation, custom branded 404, GA4 plus Vercel Analytics wired before launch, disavow file shipped for the toxic clone domain. Technical SEO: FAQPage and Service JSON-LD on every service page, BreadcrumbList sitewide, AggregateRating (5.0 across 15 verified reviews) on the homepage, llms.txt for AI crawlers, sameAs schema across Google Business Profile, Yelp, BBB, Bekins agent directory, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Content: 24 service-area city pages tiered San Jose through Atherton with neighborhood-specific local prose, 14 service sub-pages (8 residential plus 6 commercial), 5 storage sub-pages with self-storage comparison framing, and 15 published blog posts across three plays (California Exodus, Local Trust Moat, Premium Specialty Margin). Brand work: surfaced the Joe and Cheri Childs founder story, named the Bekins Spire streak explicitly, anchored the TrustBlock to USDOT 70719, CAL T 188960, NASMM Silver, BBB, Bekins, and AMSA. Hard falsification rule throughout: no fabricated stats, residential storage publishes 95 to 125 dollars per 8x10 per month, commercial pricing is project-quoted only.
Outcomes
- 461 active users and 509 sessions in 28 days (Apr 18 to May 15, 2026), up 178% versus prior 28 days
- 41% conversion rate on Google organic search traffic, 31 lead events from 75 sessions
- 45 total key events (form submits plus phone clicks) in the 28-day window, zero paid ads
- Lighthouse mobile: SEO 100, Accessibility 96 to 100, Best Practices 92 across audited pages
- Core Web Vitals: LCP 186ms, CLS 0.00 on the homepage trace
- AI search surfaces appearing in referrer logs (ChatGPT, Bing, Yahoo) within weeks of launch