Live project: a new joinery website gets a lead within 48 hours
Everyone asks me the same question: “how long will it take to get leads?” Few people actually want the honest answer, which is that it depends entirely on whether the marketing behind it is doing anything useful in the first place.
This joinery business had traded well for years on word of mouth and existing clients alone. Over the last 18 months or so, that flow had quietly been drying up, not because the work got any worse, but because competitors had started investing in genuinely well-presented websites and professional photography, while this business was still running a self-built site that hadn’t changed in over a decade. Good work, presented in a way that no longer matched what people expect to see before they trust someone with a kitchen renovation.
We rebuilt the site together. First lead came in within 48 hours of launch. No ads. Honestly, a fair bit of good timing too, a day earlier and it might not have happened at all. Here’s what the real data actually shows, not just the headline.
What the new site had to work with, honestly
The new site mixes a small number of the client’s own photos, lightly edited to present better, with stock imagery, since the professional photography of his actual completed work doesn’t exist yet. That’s a deliberate, temporary starting point, not a finished product, and replacing every stock image with real project photography is one of the first pieces of work planned for the months ahead.
What actually changed in Search Console within days
Before the new site, this business was found for barely anything beyond its own name, plus, oddly, “cabinet maker,” despite that not being his specialty. Within days of the new site launching, impressions were already running three to four times higher than the same days the week before, still a modest number in absolute terms, but the biggest single shift in visibility this business had seen in more than a year.
The clearest single data point: the search phrase “kitchen joinery Wollongong” moved from position 26 the week before launch to around position 7 within days of the new content going live. That’s a real, measurable shift, and also an expected one, since specific content about kitchen joinery simply didn’t exist on the old site at all.
The honest caveat
Will that position hold? Possibly not, and that’s worth saying plainly rather than declaring victory early. Over the coming weeks, Google will keep testing this new content against long-established competitor sites, some of which run 30 to 40 pages of content against this new site’s single main service page.
Right now, this business is competing with real substance on one hand and a genuine content disadvantage on the other.
That gap is exactly what the next phase of work is for.
A live decision, made with data instead of a guess
The new content is already showing up for searches related to “cabinets” and “cabinetry”, closely related to joinery, but not necessarily the exact positioning this business wants to be known for. That’s a real decision now in front of us: broaden the existing content to deliberately capture that adjacent demand, or build a dedicated page specifically for cabinetry work.
Neither answer is obvious yet, which is exactly why we’re using the same Search Console data I’ve written about elsewhere to make that call deliberately, rather than guessing which direction to take the site in.
What comes next
The next phase is squarely about closing the content gap: real photography and video of completed jobs replacing the current stock images, and individual project case studies planned around genuinely distinctive work, a striking blue kitchen, a dark timber finish, a custom island bench, the kind of specific, real examples that both convince a visitor and give Google something substantial to index.
Once that work is further along, I’ll put together a full case study covering the real before-and-after results, this piece is deliberately just the honest, early snapshot. If your business is still running on word of mouth alone and you’re wondering whether the same kind of foundation would work for you, get in touch and I’ll talk you through it.
I track every project against real Search Console and Analytics data from day one, including the early, unglamorous numbers, not just the results worth boasting about later. If your business is ready to move beyond referrals, see how I could help.
The lead itself, and what's being tracked now
The enquiry that came in was a genuine cold lead, someone who’d never heard of this business before, asking for a consultation on custom kitchen and laundry joinery, exactly the kind of new-customer discovery this project set out to create. Analytics and conversion tracking are now in place across the quote page, the contact page and enquiry submissions, so future progress won’t rely on impressions alone, it’ll be measured against actual enquiries, the same way every other project in this series gets measured.
