A distant challenger, neck-and-neck with incumbents 10× its size.
Sherpa Auto Transport came to A2 with a strong brand and fewer than 100 pages, sitting eighth or tenth in the space.
A strong brand with almost no content.
Sherpa is one of the oldest clients we have, and they’ve always had a tremendous, premium brand: great reviews, a very good team, a strong carrier network. They just hadn’t invested in content the way their competitors had.
When we ran our assessment they had fewer than 100 pages in Google: a blog, some guides, some evergreen content, and that was it.
Our estimate was that 80 to 85% of their traffic was people who already knew the name and looked it up. They showed up on affiliate sites under “best overall,” but nobody found Sherpa by searching how to get a car from North Carolina to California. Meanwhile they had thousands of reviews and jobs all over the country, which we saw as a real opportunity nobody else had.
Who they were up against.
This is auto transportation, so you’re shipping cars between parts of the country. The big competitors are Montway and RoadRunner Auto Transport, several of them private-equity backed, with a lot of money to spend on marketing.
Some had thousands of pages against Sherpa’s fewer than 100, and domains Google trusted more. By volume and by how they ranked, Sherpa was maybe eighth or tenth. We were definitely a challenger.
Montway Auto Transport
- Acquired by AEA Investors, November 2020
- Founded 2007; more than a million vehicles shipped
- Network of 30,000+ auto carriers
RoadRunner Auto Transport
- Bethpage, NY; “over 30 years” in vehicle shipping
- Nationwide door-to-door footprint
Market context: U.S. vehicle shipping ≈ $10.5B in 2025, down 3.7% YoY. The market isn’t growing, so every search Sherpa won came from someone else.
Competitor facts as published by the companies themselves: AEA Investors, montway.com, roadrunnerautotransport.com. Market size: IBISWorld, Vehicle Shipping Services in the US, 2025. Accessed 2026.
From under 100 pages to thousands.
Our analysis lined up each competitor’s content against where their traffic came from. Sherpa clearly needed a full programmatic rollout: state pages, state-to-state routes, city-to-city. In the United States that’s thousands of combinations, tens of thousands point-to-point.
The competitors were running a classic templated play, some good content, not great content. We had to be better, and that went double with a domain Google trusted less. Our technical SEO work hardened the foundation. After that it was being specific in ways other folks weren’t: the most relevant reviews surfaced for each market, and real pricing on every single page, which a lot of competitors won’t do.
- 01 Technical SEO & back-end hardening
- 02 Page speed & core performance
- 03 Design, CTAs & image repository
- 04 Per-market review surfacing
- 05 Real pricing on every page
- 06 Route, weather & registration data
For two or three months we sprinted out hundreds and then thousands of pages. Say you’re shipping a car from North Carolina to California. We knew the top routes state to state, the roads the carriers actually take, the weather at that time of year, and whether it’s worth paying more for an enclosed carrier instead of the open ones you see on the road. We built databases down to vehicle registration rules. Nothing was generic.
There’s a lot of seasonality in that industry, so the slow season was a good time to push. We structured it as a performance deal, where if they did better we did better.
Roughly 9× organic traffic, with one clear inflection.
Monthly organic traffic climbed from about 8,500 in June 2024 to about 79,000 in June 2026, a 9× increase, with the curve breaking upward from October 2024 through spring 2025. That’s the spring Scott Klemm describes below.
Curve is illustrative of the shape, not the monthly series. Endpoints and the inflection window: SEMrush estimates, U.S. database, pulled June 18, 2026.
Where the traffic comes from now.
Sherpa used to sell mostly to people who already knew the name. Now they’re in front of people working out how to get a car across the country. Instead of paying aggregators and brokers to reach them, they own that traffic, which means better margins and more control over their own destiny.
“Very good”
The flip · current split
Down from an estimated 80–85% searching the name at the start (our estimate). The current split is SEMrush-confirmed, June 2026. The rest is roughly 28K visits a month from people reading up, 19K from people close to buying, and 11K looking for a specific site.
Underneath that, 873 other websites now link to Sherpa across 5.4K links, and the site ranks for 33.1K search terms, about 23% of the traffic in the market we track. The content pulled those links in on its own, with no link-building campaign alongside it. Sherpa went from a distant challenger to around the number-two player in the space.
Authority Score, branded split, intent mix and footprint counts: SEMrush, U.S. database, pulled June 18, 2026. Starting branded share is an estimate from Austin Shrum, our lead on the engagement, not a tool export.
The same pages in AI search.
We didn’t build any of this for AI search. But what makes a page worth citing looks a lot like what made it worth ranking: specific data, a clear answer, a source worth trusting. So Sherpa shows up there too.
Source: SEMrush AI visibility data, pulled June 18, 2026.
“A2 sits within your company. Their goals align with ours, and that allows us both to succeed because we’re both chasing the same targets. Sherpa wins when A2 wins.”
“Last spring our organic traffic was ballooning at such a rate, it made a massive shift in our marketing strategy easy. The pages A2 built were performing exceptionally, but the side effects leaked into our other organic and paid search traffic too. If we hadn’t seen that growth, we’d still be paying affiliates tens of thousands a month for low-performing leads.”
Why the results keep compounding.
We refresh the content and keep adding information, and the flywheel kicks in. We check their data every day and build tools just for them. And we should say that Sherpa has been working on their offer, their sales center, their policies and their carrier network the whole time, so this isn’t a story where content did all of it. The longer that runs, the harder the result gets to copy.
- 01Better content
- 02More backlinks
- 03More organic traffic
- 04More reviews & credibility
- 05More margin to reinvest
- 06More value to customers
↻ And the sixth feeds the first.
Talk to us about non-brand search.
We love logistics, long-distance moving and consumer shipping especially. If you run one, the same play is open: turn your own data into content that doesn’t read as generic, and stop renting that traffic from affiliates. A lot of this result is the right capabilities meeting the right partner, so the first conversation is mostly working out whether that’s true here too.
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