From page four of Google to the top of the Clayton map in six months
Fencing and Home Services | Clayton and greater Raleigh, North Carolina | Local SEO, Google Business Profile, Content
Six months of work measured against the six months before it. Published July 2026.
| +173% more clicks from Google | +14.6 places gained in average position | 2.12 average Maps rank for “fence company” | 0% of the service area where they are invisible |
The client
Brennan’s Fence Installations is an independent fence contractor on West Main Street in Clayton, North Carolina. One location, 206 Google reviews, and a long history of installing and repairing wood, vinyl, aluminium and chain link fencing across Johnston County and the southern edge of the Raleigh metro.
Good business. Strong reputation. Almost impossible to find on Google.
The challenge
Search Console told a very specific story, and it was not the one most contractors expect. Brennan’s was not missing from Google. Over the previous six months the site was served to searchers 38,400 times and earned just 134 clicks from it, sitting at an average position of 38.4.
Position 38 is page four. That is not a volume problem, and no amount of extra content fixes it. It is a relevance problem. Google knew Brennan’s was a fence company. It did not believe Brennan’s was the fence company for Clayton.
Meanwhile the map pack was owned by operators with far more weight: Superior Fence and Rail of Raleigh with 1,200 reviews, Sierra Structures with 601, Harrison Fence with 486, and Big Jerry’s Fencing running location pages across the whole region. Yelp and Facebook threads absorbed whatever was left.
| The problem in one line Brennan’s did not need more traffic. It needed to become the most obviously local, most obviously relevant answer for a homeowner in Clayton who wants a fence. Everything below follows from that. |
The strategy
We did not start with content. We started with the diagnosis, then attacked the specific thing holding each number down.
- Google Business Profile first, website second. Fence jobs begin in Google Maps, not the blue links. We locked the primary category, built out every service and service area, kept the profile active with real job photography, and ran a consistent review request process. The profile now carries 206 reviews.
- Rebuilt relevance, not word count. An average position of 38.4 means pages exist but are not competitive. We built a genuinely distinct page for every core service and every town served, rewrote titles to lead with the town, and wrote for the homeowner who is weeks away from booking rather than for an SEO audience.
- Local authority. Chambers of commerce, local directories and industry citations, so Brennan’s reads as a genuine Clayton fixture rather than a name in a database.
- Measured from 133 coordinates, not one. A Maps ranking changes depending on where the searcher is standing, so a single rank check is close to meaningless. We run a live geo grid campaign across the service area, refreshed every two weeks. That is what showed us which corners were soft.
Result: clicks from Google up 173 percent
First party data, straight from Google Search Console. Not an estimate.
| METRIC | PREVIOUS 6 MONTHS | LAST 6 MONTHS | CHANGE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clicks | 134 | 366 | +173% |
| Impressions | 38,400 | 52,700 | +37% |
| Click-through rate | 0.3% | 0.7% | +133% |
| Average position | 38.4 | 23.8 | +14.6 places |
Google Search Console. Last six months against the previous six.
| The number that actually matters Impressions grew 37 percent. Clicks grew 173 percent. Click growth outran impression growth by nearly five to one. Brennan’s did not simply get shown more often, it got shown where people actually click. That gap is the entire return on the work. |
Result: number one across the Clayton map
Nine commercial fence keywords, scanned every two weeks from a grid of coordinates spread across the service area. Every pin below is a real search from a real location. Green stars are number one rankings.
Live geo grid rank tracking, Brennan’s Fence Installations.
| See it for yourself. This dashboard is live.Every figure on this page comes off one screen, and that screen is public. Open the live rank tracking dashboard |
Across the grid for “fence company”, Brennan’s sits at the top of the map in 80 percent of the service area and in the mid map for the other 20. Low visibility: zero. Not visible at all: zero. There is no corner of the service area where a homeowner can search for a fence company and fail to find them.
| AVERAGE GOOGLE MAPS RANK, BY KEYWORD | RANK |
|---|---|
| fence company | 2.12 |
| fence installation | 2.55 |
| fence repair | 2.58 |
| commercial fence company | 2.73 |
| fence contractor | 2.87 |
| vinyl fence company | 3.21 |
| residential fence company | 4.24 |
| wood fence company | 4.33 |
| All nine tracked keywords | 3.33 |
Lower is better. Every tracked keyword averages inside the top five across the entire grid.
Result: organic traffic and its value, both tripled
Organic traffic rose from 26 monthly visits in January to 74 in July, up 185 percent. The estimated value of that traffic went from roughly 86 dollars a month to 267, up 211 percent.
Organic traffic and organic traffic value, January to July 2026.
More useful than the total is where the growth came from.
Organic traffic split by search intent. The purple line is local intent.
| Growth in the right kind of traffic Nearly all of the gain sits in local intent searches, the purple line. That is the homeowner in Clayton looking for a fence company, not a student researching fence types. Traffic that never converts is a vanity number. This is the traffic that books estimates. |
Now outranking the directories
On the first page for “fence company clayton nc”, Brennan’s now holds the top organic result, directly beneath the map pack. It sits ahead of Yelp, ahead of Big Jerry’s Fencing and ahead of AAA Fence and Deck. All three keywords the site ranks for are in the top three.
Want results like these?
Fence Marketing Xperts runs local SEO, Google Business Profile optimisation and content for fence contractors and home services businesses across the United States.
We will run a free geo grid scan on your business and show you exactly where you rank today, from every corner of your service area. Not an estimate. The real map.