Wildlife control marketing, nationally
Seven Years on One Site. The Part That Worked, and the Part We Still Owe Them.
We built this site in 2019 and still run it. What the wildlife pages gained, what slipped in the same 90 days, and what we would fix on it tomorrow.
A Pest Control Company That Also Does Wildlife
Rid-a-Bug, ridabuginc.com, has been a client since 2019.
Start with what they are. Rid-a-Bug is a pest control company that runs a wildlife division. Pest is the bigger half. This is not a pure wildlife client and we will not imply one. The argument is that the work transfers, and it only holds if we say where it started.
Seven years is a long time to be responsible for a website. It proves we did not get fired. It does not prove the site is good. Both are on this page.
The Window We Can Actually Measure
Search Console keeps 16 months and deletes the rest. Our pull runs May 4, 2025 to Sept. 12, 2026, and that is every day of data that exists. Nothing here measures seven years, because nothing can. Inside that pull we compared two 90-day windows: Feb. 19 to May 18, 2026 against May 21 to Aug. 20, 2026.
| Clicks | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whole site | 2,142 | 2,575 | +20% |
| Wildlife pages only | 195 | 464 | +138% |
The wildlife side moved about seventeen times faster than the company around it. The rest of the site went up 8%. That is the headline, and the next section is why you should not stop reading here.
One Post Is Most of the Gain
One blog post, `/blog/7-signs-of-snakes-around-your-home`, went from 88 clicks to 400.
That is a gain of 312. The whole wildlife category gained 269. Do the subtraction and you get the real shape: every other wildlife page went from 107 clicks to 64. Down 43.
One post carried the category and then some, while the pages around it lost ground. A 138% headline sitting on that is true and incomplete, and you would have found it in ten minutes with the same export we used. We would rather be the ones who said it.
What Seven Years of Publishing Actually Looks Like
The crawl returned 629 addresses. Collapse the query-string variants and it is 505 real pages. 221 addresses sit under `/blog`, 220 of them posts. Most of the rest are city pages. The service section is small.
Here is the part that matters for a wildlife division. Exactly eight pages outside the blog name wildlife in the address, and only four of those are about an animal: fox, snake, squirrel, and raccoons and opossums. The other four are general wildlife pages that overlap each other.
So the wildlife vocabulary is real, and it lives almost entirely in blog posts instead of service pages. Nobody designed that. It is what happens when a company publishes steadily for seven years and the service section only gets touched when somebody asks.
It worked anyway, which is the honest and slightly annoying finding. Steady publishing beat a tidy structure. A tidy structure on top of steady publishing would have beaten both.
What We'd Fix Tomorrow
We built this site and we have run it for seven years, so none of the following belongs to anybody else.
- 16 city pages all carrying the same title, `Pest Control`. Sixteen pages telling a search engine they are the same page.
- 3 more all titled `Professional Pest Control Services`.
- One city page that exists twice, once at its address and once with `-2` on the end. A true duplicate.
- `/flea-extermination` and `/flea-extermination-by-rid-a-bug`, two pages for one service.
- `/crawl-space-encapsulation` and `/services/crawl-space-encapsulation`, same problem, different service.
- Two blog posts republished with a timestamp on the end of the address, so each now runs against its own earlier copy.
One thing we want exact, because a confession that overstates itself is still a bad report. The site does not have a broken URL structure. Zero `index.php` addresses. The 56 duplicate-title groups our first pass flagged collapse to 11 once query-string variants come out, and 81 pages are correctly canonicalized, which is the system working. The real problem is thin, repeated titles on city pages. Smaller than it first looked, and we are not going to inflate it to sound thorough.
What Didn't Move
Two posts went backward in the same 90 days. `/blog/what-you-need-to-know-about-baby-opossums` went from 67 clicks to 25. `/blog/carpenter-bees-vs-bumblebees` went from 456 to 220, a loss of 236 on its own.
We do not have a clean cause for either, and a cause we invented would be a guess wearing a confident tone. What we have is the number, the page, and the same export that produced the good ones. A proof page with no failures on it is a brochure.
The Wildlife Lesson
Two things transfer from this site to yours.
A deep vocabulary beats one catch-all page. Rid-a-Bug has four animal-specific service pages and four general wildlife pages. The four general ones say the same thing in four addresses and none of them owns the term. The animal-specific pages and posts are where the wildlife clicks came from. If your site has one wildlife removal page with a list of animals on it, count the animals. That list is how many pages you should have.
Repeated titles cost you the page. Sixteen city pages sharing one title is sixteen pages arguing about which one is real, and the usual outcome is that none of them wins. If you run service area pages, the fastest audit you can do this week is to open ten of them and read the browser tab.
Neither needs a budget. Both sit on a site for years because nobody is measuring them.
If you want those two checks run against your own pages before you decide anything, book a call and we will walk them with you.
Book a callFAQ
Why is the measurement window only 90 days if they have been a client since 2019?
Search Console keeps 16 months and deletes the rest. The comparison uses 90 days on each side of that window. Nobody has seven years of this data, including us.
If one post is most of the wildlife gain, does the rest mean anything?
The other wildlife pages lost ground in that window, and we said so above. It means the demand is there and the site is not built to catch it yet. A real finding, just not a victory lap.
Would you publish a page like this about my company?
Only with your name on it if you say yes, and only with numbers you can pull yourself. If they went the wrong way, we would tell you first, and you would decide whether it gets published.