B2B Construction

Boutique Builder

18 Page 1 keywords

90 days exactlyZero meetings

The Challenge

What They Were Dealing With

A boutique residential builder competing against national franchise chains with seven-figure marketing budgets. They had a decent-looking website built by a local web designer, but it was essentially a digital brochure — five pages, no blog, no service area pages, and a domain authority of 8. Their competitors had DAs of 40-60 and hundreds of indexed pages. Two previous agencies had both told them to "focus on Google Ads because organic is too competitive." They were spending $4,200/month on PPC with a cost-per-lead of $380.

The Approach

What We Actually Did

The conventional wisdom — that a small builder can't outrank national chains organically — is wrong. It's based on a misunderstanding of how Google ranks local service businesses. Domain authority matters for broad national terms, but for "[service] + [location]" queries, Google heavily weights local relevance signals, Google Business Profile optimization, and topical authority in the specific service category.

We built 14 new pages targeting specific service-location combinations: "custom home builder [suburb]," "knockdown rebuild [region]," "dual occupancy builder [city]." Each page was genuinely unique — not template garbage with the suburb name swapped out. We wrote about local planning regulations, council DA requirements, soil types, and neighborhood-specific building challenges that only someone who actually builds in those areas would know.

The technical work was straightforward but essential: LocalBusiness schema on every location page, proper NAP consistency across 23 citation sources, image optimization on portfolio photos that were loading at 4MB each, and an internal linking structure that connected project portfolio items to their relevant service and location pages.

We also created a "builds" section — essentially a mini case study for each completed project with before/after photos, timeline, budget range, and suburb. This served double duty: social proof for prospects and topical authority signals for Google.

The War Story

How It Actually Happened

The strategy hinged on one insight that the previous agencies missed entirely: national chains rank for broad terms ("home builders Australia") but they're surprisingly weak on hyperlocal queries. A franchise chain has one generic page for an entire state. A boutique builder can have a dedicated page for every suburb they work in, with genuine local expertise baked into the content.

Week one was all technical cleanup and page creation. No meetings — just a brief onboarding questionnaire about their service areas, specialties, and completed projects. By day 10, all 14 new pages were live, indexed, and starting to get impressions.

The first page 1 ranking came on day 18. "Knockdown rebuild builder [suburb]" — a term with 90 monthly searches and zero competition from the national chains because none of them had a dedicated page for it. The lead that came through that page three days later converted into a $680,000 build contract. One lead. One page. Three weeks of work.

By day 45, we had 7 page 1 rankings. The builds portfolio section was getting crawled aggressively by Google — each new project page we added was indexed within 48 hours, which told us Google's trust in the domain was building rapidly. The internal linking between portfolio items and service pages was creating topical clusters that reinforced each other.

Day 60 brought 12 page 1 rankings and a problem we hadn't anticipated: the client was getting too many enquiries to handle. They hired a project coordinator specifically to manage inbound leads. Their Google Ads spend was reduced to $1,500/month because organic was delivering higher-quality leads at zero marginal cost.

At the 90-day mark: 18 page 1 keywords, organic traffic up 340%, and a pipeline that had completely transformed the business. The marketing manager — the same one who'd been told by two agencies that this wasn't possible — described the results as something that "shouldn't be possible." It was possible. It just required someone who understood that local SEO for service businesses plays by different rules than national brand SEO.

The Google Ads budget was eventually cut to zero. The $4,200/month they'd been spending on PPC was redirected into additional build capacity. The cost-per-lead from organic search worked out to roughly $12, compared to the $380 they'd been paying per PPC lead.