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Fort Wayne SEO Case Study
+16% YoY Calls. +41.2% GBP Views. 4× AI Citations. And the Honest Story Behind the Numbers.
Client: Fort Wayne Door & Dock
Industry: Garage Door
Service: SEO · AEO
Span: 5 Months
Now here’s the part most agencies would never publish:
The full story.
Not just the numbers that make us look smart.
Because the weird months, the traffic that turned out to be robots, and the metrics that moved in opposite directions are actually more useful than a perfect little highlight reel.
SEO Case Study · Dec 2025–Apr 2026
Five Months, From First-Party Data.
Five Months, From First-Party Data.
Engagement: website rebuild + SEO/AEO program.
The new site launched November 13, 2025.
The results below cover the first five full months after launch:
December 2025 through April 2026.
And we tracked the things closest to the actual business.
Calls.
Google Business Profile activity.
Search visibility.
AI citations.
Real engaged traffic.
Not just:
“Look! Impressions!”
Because eventually somebody has to pick up the damn phone.
The Map, Before and After
Same Business. Same Keyword. Different Map.
The client called it before we charted it: “…quickly improved our local rankings for our primary garage door repair keyword after the new site launched.” — Joe Schenke, Owner, Fort Wayne Door & Dock. His full review is further down this page.
The Challenge: Launching a New Site Into the Worst Search Climate in a Decade
Fort Wayne Door & Dock needed two things.
A better website.
And a real organic search presence.
Pretty normal SEO project.
Except the ground underneath search was moving at the same time.
Google AI Overviews were changing the way customers found local businesses.
Organic click-through rates were dropping on searches where AI answers appeared.
Even searches without AI answers were seeing fewer traditional clicks.
And real browsing data showed that once Google gave users an AI-generated answer, fewer of them clicked a traditional result at all.
Translation:
Every local business was about to see its traffic reports get weirder.
Including the companies doing everything right.
So launching a new site into that environment meant one thing had to be true from day one:
We could not measure success by website traffic alone.
If Google answered the question directly…
If the customer saw Fort Wayne Door & Dock in the map pack…
If they found the business through Google Business Profile…
If AI cited the company…
If they called without ever visiting the website…
that still mattered.
Actually, it mattered more.
Because traffic is what SEO looks like.
Calls are what it’s for.
What We Did
Site Rebuild
The new website launched November 13, 2025.
Built for conversion and crawlability.
Not because we needed another design project.
Not because the old logo hurt our feelings.
And not because somebody had a quarterly website quota.
The site needed to make it easier for customers to understand the company, find the right service, and take action.
It also needed to give search engines and AI systems a much cleaner picture of:
Who Fort Wayne Door & Dock is.
What they do.
Where they do it.
And why they’re relevant.
Technical SEO
Site architecture.
Schema.
Core Web Vitals.
Crawlability.
Indexation.
The boring plumbing.
Which is usually the part people skip because nobody gets excited during a sales presentation when you say:
“Let’s talk about site architecture.”
Too bad.
The foundation matters.
Traditional rankings need it.
Local visibility needs it.
And AI systems need structured, understandable information too.
Google Business Profile
We treated Google Business Profile like a core lead-generation channel.
Because for a local garage door company?
That’s what it is.
Customers do not always need to visit the website.
They search.
See the company.
Read reviews.
Look at the service information.
Tap the phone number.
Call.
Done.
That means GBP is not some side task you hand to the intern because the holiday hours need updated.
It is part of the customer-acquisition system.
AEO / AI Citation Strategy
We structured content around the questions customers actually ask and the information AI systems need in order to understand the business.
Services.
Locations.
Problems.
Buying questions.
Clear answers.
Structured data.
Then we tracked whether AI systems were actually citing the company.
Because if Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, or another answer engine is telling someone:
“Here are the businesses that can solve this problem…”
we would very much prefer Fort Wayne Door & Dock to be in that answer.
Wild strategy.
An Honest Measurement Reset
Then the analytics got weird.
Really weird.
GA4 started showing traffic spikes that looked incredible.
The kind of chart an agency could screenshot, throw into a report, and use to renew a contract.
One problem:
A huge percentage of it was bots.
So we changed the scoreboard.
Primary reporting moved toward:
- Engaged sessions
- Google Business Profile actions
- Confirmed calls
- AI citations
- Search visibility
- Metrics we could actually defend
No pretending the robots were prospects.
The Results, Paired the Way They Should Be
We have a rule: never report traffic without calls. Traffic is what marketing looks like. Calls are what it's for.
While the industry lost clicks to AI answers, FWD&D gained calls. That's the difference between chasing traffic and engineering visibility.
The Fuller Picture
The Data, Drawn to Scale.
Organic Traffic: The Great Robot Invasion
We Didn't Hide It.
Between October 2025 and January 2026, FWD&D's analytics showed a traffic surge — peaking at 891 sessions in November, nearly double baseline. A vendor protecting a retainer puts that chart on page one and takes the victory lap.
We investigated it instead. Starting in September 2025, GA4 properties worldwide were hit by a documented bot-traffic wave. For FWD&D, 62.4% of November's sessions were unengaged bots. So we told the client their best-looking month was mostly fake — and then rebuilt reporting around engaged sessions, the GA4 metric that filters bot noise by definition. The honest baseline was lower. It was also real — and once the noise cleared, real engaged traffic was up 21%.
Why does this matter to you? Because if your marketing reports have only ever gone up and to the right, someone may be reporting the bots.
The Data, Drawn to Scale
Real axes.
No tricks.
The numbers carry it.
\[EXISTING DATA VISUALS — KEEP CURRENT LAYOUT EXACTLY\]
Here’s what the five-month picture showed.
367 Confirmed Organic Calls
December through April:
367 confirmed calls.
Cross-verified between Google Business Profile and CRM organic attribution.
The monthly totals moved around.
Because actual businesses do that.
January was strong.
February softened.
April surged.
That is what real data looks like.
Not every month goes neatly up and to the right because customers have the annoying habit of behaving like people instead of PowerPoint slides.
What matters is the direction over time.
And the outcome.
Calls finished 16% higher year over year.
Google Business Profile Views: +41.2% YoY
Google Business Profile views climbed from 1,945 in December to 2,499 in April.
Across the period:
10,348 profile views.
April finished 41.2% above the same month the year before.
And that visibility translated into something much more interesting than a view:
238 direct calls from Google Business Profile.
That is why we treat GBP as a channel.
Not a listing.
AI Citations: 4×
AI citations started at 10 in September 2025.
By April 2026:
41.
They climbed like this:
September: 10
October: 10
November: 11
December: 13
January: 22
February: 32
March: 43
April: 41
The important part is the trend.
Citations sat almost flat through fall.
Then the new site’s structured content got indexed.
December: 13.
January: 22.
February: 32.
March: 43.
Roughly 4× the original citation level.
That doesn’t mean every call can be tied neatly to an AI citation.
Attribution does not work that cleanly.
And we’re not going to invent a number because it would make the case study sexier.
What the data does show is this:
The same business gaining traditional local authority was also becoming dramatically more visible inside AI-generated answers.
That matters because the customer is no longer searching in one place.
The AI Visibility Score Had an Ugly Dip
And yes.
We kept it.
In November, the composite AI visibility score fell from 33 to 14.
Which looks terrible.
If we wanted to make ourselves look clever, we could simply show September.
Then April.
Look at us.
Growth!
Please sign the contract.
Except that would leave out what actually happened.
SEMrush added Gemini to its tracking methodology that month.
The scoreboard changed.
The score effectively reset against a broader set of AI engines.
Then it rebuilt.
By March, the visibility score had climbed back to 35, now across a larger environment that included:
- ChatGPT
- Google AI Overviews
- Google AI Mode
- Gemini
The dip belonged in the report.
So did the explanation.
Because a report without context is just numbers wearing a tie.
Organic Traffic: The Great Robot Invasion
Then we got the fun one.
GA4 reported an enormous traffic spike.
November:
891 sessions.
Nearly double normal.
Looks incredible.
Except 62.4% of November’s reported sessions were unengaged bot traffic.
October was even worse by percentage:
67.6% bot traffic.
December reported 960 sessions.
Only 454 were real engaged sessions.
So we filtered the garbage and stopped using raw sessions as the headline KPI.
The real story?
Bot-adjusted engaged traffic still grew 21%, from a pre-spike baseline of roughly 223 engaged sessions per month to around 269 per month by spring.
Organic search sessions finished 16% higher year over year.
Smaller number.
Much better data.
Because humans are generally more useful to a garage door company than robots.
For now.
Where the Rankings Landed
Five months into the engagement, the local map results looked very different.
One tracked term — “garage door opener” — jumped 96 positions, moving from effectively unranked to #4.
The primary local keyword — “garage door repair” — went from 20+ across nearly the entire Fort Wayne grid to #1 across nearly the whole grid, with only a handful of 2s and 3s in the southern band.
\[EXISTING RANKING VISUALS — KEEP IN CURRENT LOCATION\]
Behind those positions:
Fort Wayne Door & Dock had the #1 Authority Score in the tracked local market, with an Authority Score of 17 in May 2026.
The domain ranked for 619 keywords, giving it the broadest tracked keyword coverage among the local competitors being measured.
SEMrush’s traffic model estimated domain traffic growing from 292 to 715 visits per month, a 144.9% year-over-year increase.
And that number gets an asterisk.
Because it’s a third-party model.
Directional.
Not first-party analytics.
Useful.
But not the number we would use to tell you how many people actually visited the site.
That distinction matters.
We also had losses.
Two high-volume head terms slipped in the traditional organic results.
Different battlefield from the map pack.
Still real.
They went into the recovery plan.
Because apparently SEO campaigns are not legally required to pretend every keyword improves forever.
What This Means If You Run a Local Service Business
First: The Phone Is the Metric.
Sessions can be bots.
Impressions can move because Google changed the search-results page.
Rankings can rise for terms nobody buys from.
But a tracked phone call?
That is a customer raising their hand.
Measure calls.
Cross-check them.
Then follow them into the CRM far enough to know what happened.
Second: Authority Still Compounds.
AI search did not erase traditional SEO.
It built another layer on top of it.
The same things that help search engines understand and trust a business also give AI systems more evidence to work with.
Clear service information.
Useful content.
Local authority.
Reviews.
Structured data.
Strong Google Business Profile signals.
Brand mentions.
Real relevance.
Fort Wayne Door & Dock’s AI citations did not jump because we found a magic “AI SEO” button.
They grew as the entire search footprint got stronger.
Third: Demand Doesn’t Disappear. It Reroutes.
The customer can now:
Search.
See an AI answer.
See your company.
Check your Google Business Profile.
Read reviews.
Call.
Never visit the website.
Your GA4 report sees nothing.
Your dispatcher sees a customer.
That changes how local SEO has to be measured.
If your reporting still begins and ends with website traffic, you are watching one door while customers increasingly walk through another.
The Results, Paired the Way They Should Be
We have a rule:
Never report traffic without calls.
Because traffic is what marketing looks like.
Calls are what it’s for.
While the industry lost traditional clicks to AI answers, Fort Wayne Door & Dock gained calls.
Across the five-month period:
367 confirmed organic phone calls.
Tracked through two independent systems:
- 238 Google Business Profile direct calls
- 129 CRM-attributed organic calls
Not modeled.
Not estimated.
Not “phone-number clicks.”
Actual calls.
Call volume finished 16% higher year over year.
And April produced 56 direct Google Business Profile calls — the strongest GBP call month on record for the business.
Right while everyone was writing think pieces about AI killing SEO.
Apparently nobody told the customers.
What This Means for Your Business
If you're a local service business, everything above applies to you: the click decline is industry-wide, the bots polluted everyone's analytics, and the winners are the businesses that show up in the map pack and the AI's answer — with reporting honest enough to prove it.
They increased our website traffic by over 40% within the 1st month of launch and quickly improved our local rankings for our primary garage door repair keyword after the new site launched. We've only started month 1! These guys deliver on what they promise and are great to work with.Joe Schenke, Owner, Fort Wayne Door & Dock
The Result We Actually Care About
367 Confirmed Organic Calls in Five Months.
Traffic improved.
Rankings improved.
Map visibility improved.
Google Business Profile activity improved.
AI citations grew.
Great.
But strip away all the marketing language and we’re left with:
367 confirmed organic calls in five months.
That is the result.
Everything else helps explain why it happened.
And the parts that didn’t look perfect?
Those matter too.
The fake traffic.
The AI-score reset.
The keywords that slipped.
The weird movement between impressions, views, and calls.
We publish those because the job is not to make Growth Keys™ look flawless.
The job is to understand what is actually happening.
Then make the next decision.
Want to See What This Looks Like in Your Market?
This case study is one business.
One market.
One starting point.
We are not going to take Fort Wayne Door & Dock’s numbers, slap your logo on them, and promise you’ll get the same result.
That would be bullshit.
Different competition.
Different demand.
Different authority.
Different website.
Different sales process.
Different Growth Lock™.
What transfers is the process.
See the system.
Find the constraint.
Fix the right thing first.
For Fort Wayne Door & Dock, visibility was a major part of the lock.
For your business?
Maybe.
Or maybe you already rank and the calls are dying after they come in.
That’s why we diagnose first.
Book a Free Growth Lock™ Audit
We’ll look at:
- Your rankings
- Your local map visibility
- Your Google Business Profile
- Your AI citations
- Your current traffic
- Your call tracking
- Your lead flow
- What happens after the lead arrives
Then we’ll tell you where the system is actually leaking.
No borrowed case-study promise.
No generic benchmark.
Your numbers.
Your market.
Your Growth Lock™.