6x more organic keywords for CityScapes.

A Bismarck, North Dakota landscaping company went from a slow, nearly invisible website to a fast, page-one performer — rebuilt for speed and backed by an SEO program that started in March 2024.

Bismarck, ND Web design · Speed · Local SEOSEO program launched March 2024

Ahrefs organic keywords growth for CityScapes — climbing from ~30 to 184 — **Organic keyword growth (Ahrefs).** Keywords stayed flat near 30 for over a year, then climbed to **184** after SEO work began in March 2024 — the steep rise starts in April and keeps compounding through August.

184Organic keywordsup ~6x from ≈30

+1.79KRankings gainedin the last 3 months

93/100Site speed scorewas 24/100

0.2sPage load timewas 9.5s

The client

Great landscaping. An invisible website.

CityScapes is a professional landscaping company serving Bismarck, North Dakota — designing and building outdoor spaces homeowners are proud to show off. The work in the field was excellent. Online was a different story: a slow website that barely ranked in search and rarely turned visitors into leads.

The challenge

Slow, stuck, and hard to find.

A painfully slow site. The old website scored just 24/100 on mobile, with a 10.9s largest-contentful-paint and roughly 7 seconds to fully load.
Flat search visibility. Organic keywords sat near 30 for over a year with no real growth.
Few leads from search. Potential customers in Bismarck simply weren't finding them.

Google PageSpeed Insights showing the old CityScapes site at 24/100 performance — **Before:** Google PageSpeed Insights — Performance **24/100**, LCP 10.9s, Speed Index 9.5s.

Our approach

Rebuild for speed, then grow with SEO.

We started by fixing the foundation — a fast, clean website — then layered on a local SEO program to capture demand in the Bismarck market.

1. A lightning-fast rebuild

We rebuilt CityScapes on a clean, lightweight codebase and rehosted it for performance. The result is a page that loads almost instantly — a better experience for visitors and a strong signal to Google.

Before

Performance / 100

Largest paint10.9s
Speed index9.5s
Fully loaded~7.2s

After

Performance / 100

Load time0.2s
Page size390 KB
Requests17

Pingdom speed test of the rebuilt CityScapes site — grade 93 and 214ms load time — **After:** Pingdom speed test of the rebuilt site — grade 93, load time **214ms**, 390KB, 17 requests.

Side-by-side speed filmstrip: rebuilt site fully loads by 0.9s while the old site takes 7.2s — **Head to head.** The rebuilt site (top) is fully painted by **0.9s**, while the old site (bottom) is still blank past 5 seconds and finishes around **7.2s**.

Clean, lightweight markup powering the rebuilt CityScapes website — **Clean, lightweight code** — purpose-built markup with no bloat, so every page stays fast and easy for search engines to crawl.

2. A focused local SEO program

Beginning in March 2024, we built out keyword-targeted service pages, optimized on-page content for the terms Bismarck homeowners actually search, and tightened up local signals so CityScapes started showing up where it counts.

Keyword-targeted landscaping service pages
On-page optimization around local search intent
Technical SEO on a fast, crawlable foundation
Local optimization for the Bismarck market

The results

From flat to fast-growing in months.

Within weeks of the SEO program ramping up, CityScapes' search visibility took off — and it kept climbing.

Ahrefs chart showing organic keywords climbing from ~30 to 184 after March 2024 — **Organic keywords: ≈30 → 184.** Sum of rank change is up **1.79K** over the last 3 months, with estimated monthly SEO clicks and click value climbing alongside it.

★★★★★

"PPWeb rebuilt our website and it's night and day — it loads instantly and we're finally showing up when people search for landscaping in Bismarck. The leads followed."

CityScapesOwner, CityScapes — Bismarck, ND

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