Chief Electricians: real website growth that wasn't sustained
Client location: Melbourne VIC
- I built a new website for this electrician and organic search became the largest single source of real website visitors during my engagement.
- Organic search clicks grew nearly 7x and kept compounding for months after active work ended.
- Since then: non-branded organic clicks (excluding the business’s own name) have fallen from 123 to 56 in the last few months to August 2026.
- A real example of proven potential that was never built on but a business that probably relied on paid advertising to grow.
Adam and the team at Chief Electricians, a Melbourne electrical and solar installation business, had no meaningful online visibility when they engaged me in March 2021. What happened over the following five years, real, provable success early on, followed by years of inconsistent follow-through, engagement with multiple providers and a reliance on paid advertising to generate enquiries is a great example of missed potential.
What was actually built
A genuine, comprehensive foundation:
- A new WordPress site structured around Home, About, Services, Our Work, Accreditations and Contact
- Google Analytics, Search Console and Tag Manager set up and properly linked for real tracking
- Google Business Profile set up and optimised
- Site indexing submitted to both Google and Bing
- Photos sourced, renamed and optimised for search
- Page copy developed directly from keyword and search data, not guesswork
- 35 online business directory profiles set up for consistent local citations
- Listings updated across Service Seeking, HiPages and other relevant platforms
- Google and Facebook reviews pulled through onto the site
Active work wrapped up once the website was launched in July 2021, by October 2021 website admin access was handed over to Adam and his team. What the data shows afterward is genuinely one of the strongest signs the original foundation actually worked: growth kept compounding for months with no ongoing management at all.
The results, while I was actively involved and shortly after
- Real visitors and real clicks, not just visibility: organic search became the single largest source of traffic to the site, ahead of direct and social combined with organic search traffic growing from 71 to 489 across the reporting period, nearly a sevenfold increase, with no ongoing paid spend required to sustain it.
- Search impressions, how often the site was actually being shown for a relevant search, are worth mentioning as a secondary, directional signal as they climbed from 1,398 to over 51,000 across the same window, useful mainly as evidence of the direction things were genuinely heading.
- Individual service pages backed all of this up with real engagement: the split system air conditioning installation page held an average time on page over 2 minutes 30 seconds and the contact page averaged over 3 minutes, both strong signs of genuine, intent-driven visitors, not passing traffic.
What happened after the engagement ended
The original scope didn’t include ongoing content development such as case studies, real completed job examples or informational blog posts. Although it was strongly advocated but not acted on. Even adding a few examples of jobs completed may have helped convert visitors into people enquiring if nothing else as they would have proved capability. As is often the case tradies will have websites that make all the same promises such as ‘we are experienced’, ‘we deliver high quality’, ‘we are family run’, ‘we provide attention to detail’ etc but without anything to prove that. Any consumer browsing multiple sites will quickly get tired of seeing the same promises.
In April 2022, I was contacted about providing SEO and marketing packages. A proposal was put together and sent through. Nothing was taken up, and follow-ups went unanswered. The next contact, in July, was just about renewing a domain name.
The business got back in touch again in May 2024, once more asking about SEO and marketing. What followed is worth sharing directly, because it’s a genuinely fair, honest picture of a business owner trying to work out a direction without a clear strategy but they had made the decision to shift direction and alter their service offerings.
Adam was upfront and reasonable throughout: open about being time-poor, genuinely willing to invest in “sustainable, long term results,” but leaning toward paid search as a faster fix in the short term, and asking thoughtful, specific questions about cost per lead, minimum budget, and landing page strategy.
In my reply, I flagged a real, cautionary example from another client: an agency running their Google Ads campaign 30 kilometres from the business’s actual location, on the far side of Sydney, no realistic chance of a nearby customer ever seeing it, with more than 3,000 keywords being targeted, 80% of them irrelevant to the business, and no cleanup ever done.
Read about how this business owner wasted money on Google Ads.
After that exchange and after looking back over the full history, the 2022 emails, how the website had changed since I had built it, the earlier conversations, I made a judgement call: I told Adam directly I didn’t think I was the right fit for the work going forward, and offered an alternative instead, a paid session to audit and interpret whatever he wanted, an independent, unbiased read on his own data, rather than take on another management engagement.
Nothing further eventuated from that conversation either.
Where things actually stand now
Checking the real data through 2025 and into 2026 tells a story of great potential.
For the July to September 2025 period, organic search made up 39% of traffic, up 40% year on year, a genuinely positive sign on its own. Total visitors sat at just 543, only 55% of it clearly flagged as coming from Victoria which is not too different to the results I had achieve by early 2022 in terms of raw numbers.
A year earlier, over the same July to September window, direct traffic made up the largest share at 38%, organic around 27%, and paid advertising made up a full 25%, with overall traffic up 35% year on year, but no way to confidently say what was actually driving that growth, since no conversion tracking (“key events”) had been set up to measure it properly and the direct traffic I suspect is paid advertising activity that isn’t being attributed correctly.
Website form leads tell a similarly unclear story: 166 in 2024, jumping to 362 in 2025, then falling to under 100 through the first part of 2026. That swing is plausibly explained by a period of heavier paid advertising, showing up as unattributed “direct” traffic, or a different lead capture method being used at different times, but without proper tracking in place, it’s genuinely hard to say with confidence.
A blog was started in October 2025, seven posts were published, and then nothing more until July 2026.
The clearest, most concrete signal sits in Search Console.
For the three months to August 2026, clicks on searches for the brand name itself fell to 270, down from 462 in the previous period, plausibly a sign that a burst of paid advertising had been driving people to search the brand directly, without that recognition translating into lasting brand trust. More tellingly, organic clicks excluding the brand name entirely, the genuine measure of whether new customers are finding the business through the actual services it offers, fell from 123 to just 56 over the same year.
Whatever combination of agencies, contractors or in-house effort has been applied since 2022 hasn’t delivered a lasting result. The site is, for anything beyond its own name, becoming close to invisible again. Although with the volume of work they have probably completed in their local area they have a good level of in market awareness & a huge referral base.
The actual lesson here
This isn’t a story about a bad business, poor decisions, or a business owner who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Nothing here suggests Chief Electricians isn’t a perfectly healthy, functioning business, run on a mix of paid advertising, brand recognition and word of mouth, the same combination plenty of trade businesses rely on successfully all around Australia (and probably the world)
What it does show clearly is real, demonstrated potential that was never built on.
For a period, this business proved that organic search could deliver a genuine, compounding flow of new customers who’d never heard of it before, without an ongoing ad budget required to sustain it. That potential is still sitting there, largely untapped, five years later.
It’s also worth some real empathy for why. After an initial success he didn’t build on, several subsequent attempts with other providers appear to have delivered underwhelming results too, maybe without ever being clearly measured or explained. It’s a completely understandable response to become wary of spending on “marketing” or “SEO” with anyone after that pattern repeats a few times, even though that caution ends up reinforcing the exact problem: relying more heavily on paid ads, which stop working the moment the spend does, instead of an asset that keeps working long after the invoice is paid.
It’s a similar scenario that I have written about before, why business owners only execute half their marketing advice. Most likely the paid advertising activity delivered enough lead volume in a short period of time at a manageable cost that the business didn’t feel it needed to spend money on other channels.
One small detail that I am proud of: the website today still uses a lot of the original design elements built during that first engagement in 2021. The foundation, visually at least, was solid enough that nobody’s felt the need to replace it completely.
If your business had a real result once and you’re not sure why it didn’t last, get in touch and I’ll help you find out.
I build a genuine foundation and I’m honest when I’m not the right fit for what happens next, sometimes the most useful thing I can offer is an independent, unbiased look at your own data rather than another retainer. If a past marketing result didn’t last and you’re not sure why, see how I could help.
