Already winning offline.
Invisible online.
Three businesses with real reputations and no way for anyone to find them.
I keep client names off case studies. Figures come from the clients’ own systems and stay private.
Where these start
A pattern, not a coincidence. A business that has been good at what it does for years, with customers who arrived by word of mouth, and a website that either does not exist or was built in a decade when websites were brochures. Nobody searching for what they sell ever finds them.
Luxury pool builder, Los Angeles
Pools starting at three hundred thousand dollars, for clients who expect to be impressed before the first call. No website, and no presence in Google at all.
Interior designer, Barcelona
Award-winning work and an outdated site that showed none of it. The rebuild is a portfolio that gives the work the room it needs, which for a designer is most of the sales conversation.
Travel company, Israel into the American market
An old Flash site that no longer worked for anyone. Rebuilt from nothing, including a custom payment step where the client enters the amount instead of choosing from fixed packages. The site now takes tens of thousands of dollars a month.
- Competitor research first. Before a page is drawn, what the market already ranks for and who holds it.
- Their keywords, checked. Each client gave me the terms they wanted. I checked which were winnable, said plainly which were not, and adjusted.
- Built so launch day is not the start of the SEO work. Structure, menus, meta and schema in place before the site went live.
- Ready for what comes next. When they later run paid campaigns or add a market, the foundation is already there.
What we gave up
Los Angeles has enormous demand for pool contractors, and the high-volume terms were open. They would have brought plenty of enquiries.
The client did not want them. A pool that starts at three hundred thousand dollars sells to a small audience, and every enquiry from outside it costs selling time. The report would have looked better and the calls would not have closed.
We gave up the volume and built local visibility around named neighbourhoods, from a list the client supplied. Fewer searches, and they belong to people who live where a pool like that gets built.
This is the hardest kind of decision to present in a meeting, because the bigger number always sounds like the better offer.
What changed afterwards
For the travel company the site stopped being a brochure and started selling. It carries live exchange rates and a blog, and it keeps growing on content. It is no longer a project that ended on launch day.
For the designer the change was a different one. She suddenly had something to send. She began pulling pages from the site into her newsletter and sharing them on social. For an interior designer, one link that holds the best of the work is part of the sale, and she did not have one before.
Why two of these have no numbers
The travel company’s figure is theirs to share, and they have. For the other two the performance data belongs to the client, and I am not going to paraphrase numbers I am not free to publish.
What a website cannot manufacture
None of this helps a business that is not already good. All three had reputations before they had websites, and the work was making something real visible instead of making something ordinary look impressive. If the word of mouth is not there yet, a website will not create it.