Brand · Web · Print · Marketing
A site that was functionally invisible
At onboarding the site scored 22 out of 100 for technical health and attracted roughly 6–15 organic visitors a month. Only ten keywords were indexed, and there was no structured data anywhere on the site — meaning no AI assistant could confidently cite it.
The audit surfaced problems that went well beyond SEO housekeeping: a generic construction-industry theme on a compliance certification business, five testimonials all using the same stock photograph, achievement counters displaying zero, an out-of-region phone number for a London service business, a homepage H1 that simply read “Home”, 110 broken internal links, and Core Web Vitals that could not even be tracked because of a legacy slider plugin.
Four workstreams, run in parallel
Technical SEO
- H1s and title tags rebuilt site-wide around real service terms
- Canonicals, sitemap and robots.txt verified and corrected
- Broken internal links cut from 110 to 69, then driven lower; external from 21 to 3
- Duplicate content eliminated; duplicate titles cut from 6 to 2
- Service URLs restructured around long-tail keywords, with hreflang deployed
On-page & content
- Six core service pages fully optimised
- Hero, About and service copy rewritten for the actual audience
- Fabricated social proof and placeholder counters removed entirely
- Correct London contact details and local calls to action
AEO — answer engine optimisation
- 15 FAQ entries written to answer real search questions directly
- Five factual corrections made and sourced, so the content is quotable
- Content structured specifically for ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews
GEO — generative engine optimisation
- Seven JSON-LD schema blocks deployed — markup score 100%
- LocalBusiness, FAQPage and five Service schemas
- 888 topically relevant backlinks submitted across 296 platforms; 442+ indexed
Every core metric moved
Site health went from 22 to 83. Authority score rose from 0 to 6. Referring domains grew from 89 to 167. Organic keywords went from 10 to 68. Search clicks over 90 days rose to 106, with impressions up to 27,000.
Technical performance now reads 92 for SEO, 84 for accessibility and 81 for best practices in PageSpeed Insights, with First Contentful Paint at 0.6 seconds.
Cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews
Property compliance is a research-heavy purchase. People ask questions before they buy: how often a certificate is required, what an inspection costs, which regulations apply. Those questions increasingly get answered by an AI assistant rather than a list of blue links.
By building an FAQ layer with sourced, factually corrected answers and wrapping the site in complete structured data, five of the client’s pages are now actively cited by AI engines — up from none. That is visibility a competitor without schema simply cannot access.