Pro Steel Engineering: building a business's first-ever website
Client location: Canterbury, Sydney NSW
- The business’s first-ever website, built from nothing on a limited budget
- First-page local keyword rankings appearing within a few weeks of launch
- An organic click-through rate close to 10%, well above average
- 30+ online citations established to help confirm the business across the internet
- A Google PageSpeed Insights score of 79/100
- A genuine baseline to build on, with a full audit run 8 weeks after launch
In December 2020, I built the first website Pro Steel Engineering and Fabrication had ever had. George, the owner, had traded for years on word of mouth and his Instagram and Facebook profiles alone. With a limited budget, the brief was to build a genuine foundation he could add to over time, not a finished, fully-built-out site from day one.
What I actually did
- Built a new WordPress site using Elementor
- Wrote the site’s copy based on George’s own input about the business
- Sourced, edited and properly renamed a full catalogue of photos to help with SEO
- Ran basic competitor research into the phrases and terms similar businesses were using
- Set up and optimised a new Google Business Profile
- Set up a shortcut link to make it easy for George to collect reviews
- Submitted the completed site to Google Search Console to check indexing and catch early errors
- Sourced stock imagery to complement George’s own photos where needed
- Ran a full audit 8 weeks after launch to set a baseline for further work
The early results
- Real, if modest, movement within weeks of a genuinely new site launching
- First-page local keyword rankings beginning to appear within a few weeks
- A click-through rate from organic search close to 10%, well above average, largely down to properly written meta descriptions and relevant on-page content
- 30+ online citations established, helping confirm the business’s name, address and phone number consistently across the internet, a real factor in local search authority
- A clean, simple, mobile-first design, a deliberate echo of the precision in George’s actual trade
- A Google PageSpeed Insights score of 79/100
Where the project was deliberately limited
This was a first step, not a finished platform, and it’s worth being honest about what a six-page site can and can’t do against competitors who’ve had hundreds of pages online for years. A few areas I flagged for George directly:
- Individual project pages. Showcasing before, during and after photos of completed jobs, both to build trust and to create genuine SEO opportunities around specific services
- Client reviews. Genuinely one of the fastest ways to build trust with a new visitor, and a real ranking factor Google uses directly
- Staff photos. George chose not to feature himself on the site, a legitimate choice plenty of businesses make, though for some clients seeing the person behind the brand does real work building credibility
- Ongoing content depth. Engineering is an enormous, competitive category online. A heading and a paragraph per service was never going to be enough to win real rankings against established competitors, dedicated content for each specific niche and service area was the recommended next step
- Google Business Profile posts. Work George had already been sharing on social media wasn’t making it onto Google Business Profile, where it could actually help organic visibility. Nobody searches Google and gets a Facebook post back as a result
An update looking back from 2026
By August 2022, George agreed to invest in real content for the first time: three blog posts specifically showcasing completed projects, a mezzanine, custom privacy screens, and a steel staircase, the exact project types he wanted to sell more of at the time. He also finally added the homepage video and profile photos I’d recommended from the very start of the engagement. The advice behind all of it was simple: showcase the work he actually enjoyed doing, or that made him the most money, since that’s what a genuine point of difference is built from.
After those first three posts, he didn’t want to create any more and there was little content shared to social media either, meaning there was still effectively no visible proof of his work anywhere online. He tried running paid ads around this time. They generated no results, unsurprising given how little evidence of real work the site, or anywhere else, actually showed a stranger, the same problem I’ve written about refusing to run ads into elsewhere.
As of 2026, his Google Business Profile shows just eight reviews.
Even with that limited content investment, the site recorded its highest-ever organic search result by the end of 2022, just over 2,000 visitors across all sources in a single period, real, measurable proof the strategy was working. The business still operates today, most likely surviving mainly on word of mouth and existing referrals, common for a lot of small trade businesses, rather than the further growth continued content investment could have unlocked.
The engagement ended in December 2022, over two specific disagreements worth recording since both are useful examples of exactly the kind of decision that quietly limits a business’s growth.
- The first was the homepage video. I’d built it around a deliberate mix of large-scale factory work and both commercial and residential job sites, since George had told me he wanted to win more commercial and government contracts, and a blended, more substantial-looking presentation was meant to appeal to that broader audience. George wanted it replaced because it didn’t show his own specific factory & he didn’t like the clips. The replacement he requested instead was footage of a home balustrade installation, a purely residential job, sitting at odds with his own stated goal of winning bigger commercial and government work.
- The second was the site’s colour scheme. I was asked to change it, with vague direction and a suggested palette that didn’t even match his own logo at the time. As of August 2026, the site still uses the same colours and design I originally built, the change was never actually made by whoever took over the account afterward, which makes the entire disagreement, in hindsight, a genuine waste of everyone’s time.
After the disagreement, George brought in someone else to manage the site. Not too much has changed since: a handful of new dedicated service pages which makes a lot of sense, some updated headings, but the same foundational structure from the original build, still intact four years later.
If you’re a trade or engineering business still relying on word of mouth and social media alone, get in touch and I’ll help you build a real foundation to grow from.
I build every first website as a genuine foundation to add to, not a finished product on day one, and I’m upfront about exactly what still needs building afterward. If your business has never had a proper online presence, see how I could help.
