Heilbronn Building: "Someone found my website and called me"
Client location: Randwick, Sydney NSW
- A real client email, unprompted: “Someone just found my website and called me! They searched ‘local builder’ and called me.”
- Organic search impressions grew from a standing start to over 10,000 within a year
- Organic search made up 45.5% of all site traffic, on a budget of roughly half a day’s work a month
- A deliberately modest scope of work, matched exactly to a client who explicitly didn’t want more leads than he could handle
- A genuinely honest ending: the technical framework built here was later removed when the business moved to a full agency rebuild
People are [now] finding my website and contacting me :)
Look no further, Paul will get it done for you!"
Tim Heilbronn runs a boutique renovation and building business targeting a specific, high-end Sydney clientele made up of owner-occupiers in the east, inner west and north shore who want quality work with minimal disruption to their lives. I know what you are thinking, that is practically like every other builder in Sydney.
He got in touch by cold email, admitting upfront he “know[s] more about timber and hammers” than marketing and that his existing website might be “all crap.”
It wasn’t, it just wasn’t working as well as it could. His honesty was refreshing too.
What the audit actually found
- The site failed Google’s mobile PageSpeed test outright, under 50 out of 100
- Mobile layout needed real work
- The site wasn’t ranking for anything, my own tools picked up nothing at all and not even a Sitemap was being submitted to Google.
- The overall look and feel was genuinely solid, the problem wasn’t presentation
- Not enough real project examples or before/during/after photos to actually prove the quality of the work
- Google Business Profile wasn’t optimised
- Social profiles were reasonable but inconsistent
- The brand had no real personality behind it, no faces, no team, nothing to differentiate it from any other renovation builder
An honest conversation about a genuinely tough category
Renovation is one of the most competitive categories in digital marketing. “Home renovation Sydney” alone returns 14 million Google results.
At the time I told Tim about that situation rather than oversell what was realistic, and gave him two honest paths:
1) A full investment to compete properly
or
2) A lighter, ongoing clean-up, roughly half a day of work a month, at $350 including GST, focused on making the site work harder for the word-of-mouth enquiries he was already getting.
I was also upfront that paid ads in this category cost between $10 and $30 per click, an expensive, short-term tactic that builds no lasting brand value, versus SEO, which compounds over time but needs occasional upkeep to hold its position.
A client with genuinely refreshing, modest goals
This is worth talking about because it’s rare. Tim didn’t want a flood of leads.
In his own words: “I’d be happy if the conversion… was 1-2 leads a month… if it were 20 it would be an overkill and pointless.”
He was already booked out through word of mouth. What he actually wanted was a website that didn’t quietly undersell him to the people already finding it and maybe to get a few new leads to try and fill gaps in his schedule during the year.
Even with a clear scope written down, Tim understandably wanted more clarity before committing further, asking direct, sensible questions about what SEO actually involved, whether rankings would fade without ongoing work and whether a simpler, “tap on and off” paid approach might suit him better given his modest goals.
That’s a business owner doing exactly what a business owner should do before spending money and it’s a fair reminder that a long written scope of work doesn’t always land as clearly as it reads to the person who wrote it or even be necessary depending on the goals of the business. The challenge though was to get that sort of visibility in a competitive niche meant competing with everyone who was investing to get found online either organically or via paid search.
In some senses the goal is conflicted & the only real solution was to present as a specialist of a particular style, type of building or something niche that he could own vs general building renovations.
What was actually delivered
Matched to the approved budget and Tim’s own stated goals, the real scope came down to:
- Renaming and editing every project photo to be genuinely useful for search, then uploading them to Google Business Profile
- Creating Google Business Profile posts showcasing completed jobs alongside real reviews
- Fully optimising the Google Business Profile for local enquiries
- Connecting the website’s gallery page directly to Tim’s Instagram feed, so new posts appeared automatically
- Reviewing and refining the existing site copy
- A full technical audit summarising exactly what could be improved
- Implementing the approved changes directly
- A written summary of visitor traffic and search performance to close the loop
Along the way, some genuinely useful guidance went beyond the my brief such as recommending Tim shoot future phone photos from further back to capture more of each room and pointing him toward a professional photographer other clients had used successfully, a relatively small investment that pays off enormously for a business trying to sell trust in high-end work.
The results
Across the engagement, the site earned 631 visitors and 1,753 page views, with organic search making up 45.5% of all traffic putting that ahead of all other sources like Direct (38.7%) and Referral (11.3%) combined.
Organic search impressions climbed from a standing start to over 10,000 within about a year and clicks grew steadily from zero to 173 over the same period.
Branded search performed strongly, “heilbronn building” itself held an average position of 1.33 with a 47.62% click-through rate which is no surprised, but early, genuinely promising signals were showing up on non-branded terms too, “unit renovations sydney” was already appearing at position 6.
Then, genuinely unprompted, the email above arrived: “Someone just found my website and called me! They searched ‘local builder’ and called me.”
That’s the entire point of this work, made real, in Tim’s own words, not a metric on a dashboard.
Being honest about the scale of what was possible
Tim’s original brief described a broad, high-end Sydney audience.
What actually got approved was headings, some page copy, and image changes, not a full rebuild.
Given that gap, the realistic outcome was always going to be genuinely useful but modest, local visibility largely within a kilometre or so of the Google Business Profile listing, not broad competitive ranking against every renovation builder in Sydney.
That’s not a shortfall in the work, it’s exactly what that scope of investment could reasonably produce and it’s worth being clear about that rather than pretending otherwise. Tim had no chance to rank for highly competitive service terms with a website that had less than 10 pages of content.
What actually happened next
The engagement wrapped up once the approved changes were made. The site looked much the same as before, but with genuinely better foundations underneath it.
Tim later chose to engage a larger agency for a complete website rebuild, and in doing so, the technical framework built during this engagement was removed entirely along with the old site.
That’s a genuine, honest example of the same risk I’ve written about elsewhere: a redesign that looks better on the surface can quietly erase real, working SEO groundwork if whoever’s doing the rebuild doesn’t know, or doesn’t check, what was already there and why it was working. So while it looked like a beautiful website it lacked the structure to keep him visible online, so he would have been back to square one pretty quickly.
What the client actually said
“Paul has produced great results for my business profile on a small business budget. People are [now] finding my website and contacting me :). Look no further, Paul will get it done for you!”
Tim Heilbronn, Heilbronn Building
If you’ve got modest, realistic goals and a genuinely small budget to match, get in touch and I’ll tell you honestly what’s achievable with it. I scope the work to match the client’s actual goals and budget, not the other way around, whether that’s a modest local clean-up or a full campaign. If you want an honest read on what’s realistic for what you’re able to invest, see how I could help.
