When this client came to us, the business had been open for a few years and was running almost entirely on word of mouth. The website existed, technically. It was not ranking for anything, it was not showing up in Maps, and it was generating one or two organic leads a year. Not a month. A year.
What we found in the audit
Before touching anything, we ran a full audit across the profile, the site, and the local competitive set. Three things stood out immediately.
- The Google Business Profile had the wrong primary category, no service areas set, and no products or services filled in.
- The site had one page trying to rank for every service at once, with no location signals anywhere on it.
- Citations were inconsistent across directories, with three different phone numbers in circulation.
None of this was exotic. It was the same set of fundamentals most local businesses never get around to. That is exactly why the opportunity was so large.
The order we fixed it in
Sequence matters more than most people think. Fixing the site before the profile means Google keeps reading stale signals. Building content before the foundation means the content has nothing to hang off. We work outward from the profile.
Weeks 1 to 3: profile and foundation
Corrected the primary and secondary categories, mapped service areas to the neighbourhoods that actually mattered, filled in every service with real descriptions, and standardised the phone number across every citation we could reach.
Weeks 4 to 8: on page and structure
Split the single catch all page into dedicated service pages, each with location signals, schema, and a clear conversion path. This is where the traffic curve started to move in Search Console.
Weeks 9 onward: conversion and entity work
Once traffic was arriving, the bottleneck moved to the funnel. We rebuilt the enquiry flow, tightened the offer, and added the entity and review work that eventually got the business named directly in AI search results.
Where it landed
The full set of screenshots, including the before and after ranking heatmaps and the Search Console curve, is on the results page.
What to take from this
If your business is invisible right now, the fix is almost never a clever tactic. It is the boring foundational work, done in the right order, and then actually maintained. That is the whole game.
If you want to know which of these gaps applies to your business specifically, that is what the free audit covers.