Case Study
How custom WordPress development and a comprehensive SEO strategy propelled a New Jersey heavy equipment dealer from page 4 to page 1 on Google.
Organic Traffic
2,400 / month
8,900 / month
271% increase
Google Ranking
Page 4
Page 1, #3
"CAT equipment NJ"
Form Submissions
15 / month
52 / month
247% increase
Core Web Vitals
All failing
All passing
LCP, INP, CLS green
The Client
Foley, Inc. is a premier Caterpillar equipment dealer headquartered in New Jersey, serving the tri-state area with sales, rentals, parts, and service for construction, paving, and power systems equipment. With multiple locations and a legacy spanning decades, Foley is a trusted name in the heavy equipment industry.
Despite their strong offline reputation, Foley's digital presence wasn't matching their industry standing. Competitors with smaller inventories and less expertise were outranking them in search results, capturing leads that should have been going to Foley. The company recognized that a fundamental upgrade to their WordPress site and SEO strategy was overdue.
The Challenge
Foley, Inc. faced a frustrating paradox: they were one of the most respected CAT dealers in the Northeast, but you'd never know it from their Google search rankings. For their most valuable keyword — "CAT equipment NJ" — they sat on page 4 of search results, buried behind competitors, directories, and even unrelated businesses.
A comprehensive technical and SEO audit uncovered the root causes. The WordPress site was built on an outdated theme with bloated code. All three Core Web Vitals metrics — Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift — were in the failing range. The site lacked proper schema markup, had duplicate title tags across dozens of pages, and was missing structured data entirely. Internal linking was virtually nonexistent, with most pages orphaned from the site's navigation structure.
Content was another major gap. The site had thin service pages with generic descriptions that could apply to any equipment dealer. There was no blog, no location-specific content, and no content strategy targeting the keywords their potential customers were searching for. Organic traffic sat at just 2,400 monthly visits — a fraction of what a dealer of their size and reputation should attract — and only 15 form submissions per month were coming through the website.
The Solution
I delivered a comprehensive solution that combined custom WordPress development with a strategic WordPress SEO overhaul. The approach was methodical: fix the technical foundation first, then build the content and authority layer on top.
Rather than patching the existing theme, I built a custom WordPress theme from scratch, engineered for performance and SEO:
"Paul is a skilled developer who delivers quality work on time. His WordPress expertise and attention to detail made our project a success.
The Results
The combined WordPress rebuild and SEO strategy delivered results that built steadily over 6 months and continued to compound. The technical improvements created an immediate boost, while the content and authority strategy drove sustained organic growth.
Organic traffic grew from 2,400 monthly visits to 8,900 — a 271% increase driven primarily by improved rankings for commercial-intent keywords. The site went from ranking on page 4 for "CAT equipment NJ" to page 1, position 3, putting Foley directly in front of buyers actively searching for equipment. This single keyword alone drove an estimated 450 additional monthly visits.
Beyond the primary keyword, the site saw ranking improvements across 200+ keywords. Thirty-seven keywords moved to page 1 positions that were previously not ranking in the top 50. The location pages proved particularly effective, capturing local search traffic that competitors were missing entirely.
Core Web Vitals moved from all failing to all passing. Largest Contentful Paint improved to 1.2 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint dropped below 40ms, and Cumulative Layout Shift was reduced to 0.02 — well within Google's "good" thresholds. These improvements contributed to both the ranking gains and a measurably better user experience.
The business impact was substantial. Monthly form submissions jumped from 15 to 52 — a 247% increase. The quality of leads also improved, as visitors arriving through organic search for specific equipment queries had stronger purchase intent. The Foley team reported that online-sourced leads converted at a 22% higher rate compared to leads from other channels.
Key Takeaways
Fixing Core Web Vitals, schema markup, and site architecture created the technical foundation that made content and keyword optimizations effective. Without it, even great content would have underperformed.
The move from a bloated commercial theme (380KB CSS) to a custom theme (45KB CSS) was the single biggest factor in Core Web Vitals improvements. Cleaner code means faster rendering and better crawlability.
Location-specific pages targeting "[service] + [city]" keywords captured high-intent local searches that the previous site was completely missing, becoming one of the top traffic drivers within 3 months.
Get a custom WordPress site built for performance and SEO — the same approach that helped Foley, Inc. achieve 271% organic traffic growth.
