Meta description: A laundromat owner’s “top laundromats in our city” page got 26 clicks in 16 months. Here is what the data said, what we built instead, and what we are watching for 12 weeks.
TL;DR Our store published a “Top Laundromats in Everett” page in 2025 that ranked itself first. Over 16 months Google showed it 19,604 times and people clicked it 26 times, and its position slid from about 7 to 14. We replaced it, at the same URL, with an unranked guide to every laundromat in the city, facts taken from each competitor’s own website and dated, with our own store listed like everyone else. If you are tempted to write a “best laundromats in [city]” page for your store, read this first.
What the old page was
A comparison table with our store on top, grades like “Excellent” and “Basic” for the others, and a section called “How we ranked”. It was the kind of page every local SEO checklist tells you to build. Three of the competitor rows were never even filled in; they still said “[Address]” and “[Yes/No]” a year later, and nobody noticed because nobody was reading.
What the numbers said
- 19,604 impressions, 26 clicks, a click rate of 0.13 percent. Google kept showing the page; searchers kept skipping it.
- Average position fell from about 7 in late 2025 to 12 to 16 by mid 2026.
- The queries it appeared for were the ones our home page already won. For “laundromat everett” the home page sat at position 4 with 20 clicks in 90 days; the guide got 2 clicks in 16 months for the same query.
- “Best laundromat everett” demand was about 230 impressions in 16 months. The map pack and Yelp own that search anyway.
- It even ranked for a competitor’s name and sent those searchers to an empty placeholder row about that competitor.
Two things made the decision easy. Google’s own guidance on review and comparison content asks for first-hand evidence and lists that stand on their own, and a business that ranks itself first offers neither. And the FTC’s 2024 rule on reviews bars presenting a page you control as an independent review of a category that includes you. “How we ranked” was exactly that.
What we built instead
The page is now Laundromats in Everett, WA: an honest guide. Same URL, new concept:
- A disclosure in the first paragraph: we run one of the laundromats listed, we benefit when you choose us, nobody is scored by us.
- Every laundromat in the city, grouped by area from north to south, because alphabetical order would have put our store first.
- Only facts each business publishes on its own website, with the date we checked, and “not published” where a site says nothing. Where a site contradicts itself, we say so.
- Google ratings and review counts for every listing, as they stood on the day we checked. Ours is the highest in town, and the table is allowed to show that because it shows everyone’s.
- The questions people actually type: is anything open 24 hours (no), where does a king comforter fit, what wash and fold costs per pound, who is open Sunday.
- No star markup, no ranked list in the schema, no “best” anywhere.
We also called one competitor and found their drop-off price was 20 percent higher than their website said, with no set turnaround. That went on the page too, with the date, because the point of the page is to be the one place where the facts are right.
What it costs
Upkeep. Eight sets of hours and prices go stale, so an automated check reads each competitor’s site every 60 days and tells us what changed, and we update the page and its “facts checked” date. If we ever stop doing that, the page gets redirected to our self-service page. A stale directory is worse than none.
The other thing we learned: Google is sitting on our city pages
While pulling the data we found that four of our pickup-and-delivery city pages have never been indexed, after months in the sitemap and links from every other page on the site: Sammamish, Kenmore, Lake Stevens and Snohomish. Search Console calls it “Discovered, currently not indexed”. Google is choosing not to crawl templated city pages, which is a verdict on the template, not on the cities. We are testing three fixes: outside links (this post is one), a Business Profile post for each route, and making each page say something only true of that city.
What we are measuring
Baseline for the guide: 2 clicks from 3,292 impressions in the three months before the rebuild. The test runs 12 weeks. It worked if the page earns 10 or more clicks a month from non-brand searches, holds a position under 12 without sliding, and sends real direction and pickup clicks. If it does not, it gets redirected and we will write that up too.
If you run a laundromat and already have a “best laundromats” page that ranks you first, pull your Search Console numbers for it before you decide anything. Ours told the whole story in one table.
