A building inspection company

This is our longest-running client. When we started, they were nowhere. Not page two. Nowhere.

Eighteen months later they were number one for the search term their entire business depends on, and they have been at or near the top ever since.

Why this one matters more than the ranking

Number one for a vanity term is a screenshot. Number one for the term in a category like this is a business model.

Building inspection is close to a pure search category. Almost nobody has a relationship with an inspector before they need one. They are usually buying a house, they are usually on a deadline, and the process is the same every time: search, look at the first few results, call one or two. There is very little brand loyalty and very little repeat custom, because most people buy a house rarely.

That means the search result is not a marketing channel for this business. It is the front door. Ranking first has given them a consistent, predictable source of leads for years, which in a category with no repeat business is close to the only way to build something stable.

The biggest lever was not on the website

Early on we told them the strongest thing they could do was change the business name so that it matched what people actually search for. They did it.

Most clients won’t, and we understand why. It’s disruptive, it costs money, and it only really makes sense early in a business’s life. But it is worth knowing that the single highest-impact SEO recommendation we have ever made had nothing to do with a website, and that we would rather tell a client something inconvenient and true than something comfortable and marginal.

It is also the honest explanation for why eighteen months produced a result this durable. The name did a great deal of the work. Everything below is what made it hold.

Eighteen months, not eighteen weeks

It took a year and a half to get there, and that timeline is the honest part of this story.

The first six months looked like very little. The visible progress arrived in the second year. If they had judged the work at the three month mark, which is roughly when most clients get nervous and a lot of agencies get sacked, they would have concluded it was not working and stopped just before it started.

The reason we are so blunt with new clients about timeframes is this case. The result was excellent and it was also slow, and both of those things are normal.

Holding it is its own job

They have not sat at number one uninterrupted. They slip occasionally, and when they do we go and find out why: a competitor investing, a Google update reshuffling the category, something on the site quietly degrading.

This is the part that gets left out of most case studies, because “we won and then it was finished” is a better story. It isn’t true. A first position in a competitive local category is a thing you defend, not a thing you achieve. That defence is most of what the ongoing work actually is, and it is why we would rather have a client for years than deliver a result and disappear.

We have some slippage to address for them right now, in fact. That is the job.