01 · The problem
Nail City Painting is a commercial painting outfit in Wheeling, West Virginia. They came to us with a 4-page website that hadn't been touched in two years, a Google Business Profile their old marketing guy still controlled, and a hard deadline — a big commercial bid was due in a week and the prospect was about to Google them.
Two specific problems on the website: (1) every photo was named IMG_0421.jpg with no alt text, and (2) the service area copy mentioned exactly one city. They serve a 90-mile radius. Google had no idea.
02 · What we did
Day 1 — Audit, ownership, and structure
- Pulled the existing site, audited every page, mapped what was missing.
- Transferred GBP ownership to the client's Google account. Old marketing guy was politely removed.
- Locked in a 9-page sitemap: home, 3 service pages, 3 location pages, about, contact.
- Wired Rank Math, set up schema baseline (LocalBusiness + Service), opened Search Console.
Day 2 — Build and content
- Built every page in WordPress with a contractor-tuned template — fast, no fancy animations, mobile-first.
- Wrote service page copy from a 30-minute call with the foreman, not from a content brief.
- Rebuilt location pages — Wheeling, Steubenville, Weirton — with real local detail, not city-spam.
- Sammy ran the bulk image rename + alt-text pipeline. 212 photos processed, every one with a descriptive alt.
Day 3 — Launch, schema, GBP
- DNS cut over to the new site. Old site archived.
- Schema validated for every page. Sitemap submitted to Google.
- GBP service areas updated to match the new location pages. First GBP post went live the same hour.
- Indexing requested on the 5 priority pages. Three of them indexed inside 48 hours.
03 · The results
- 9 pages indexed within the first week. All 9 within two weeks.
- 3 of the 5 priority pages ranking page-1 for their target keyword within 30 days.
- The bid won. The prospect Googled them, saw the new site, and the foreman closed the deal.
- GBP impressions up 4.2× in the first 60 days, from local-pack inclusion alone.
- Zero downtime on the domain during the migration.
04 · Tools used
Stack was deliberately boring: WordPress, Rank Math, a contractor-tuned starter theme, Sammy for the image automation, and Google Search Console. No fancy headless setup. No JavaScript framework. We picked the stack that would still be running in five years without us.
Heist Labs CRM (Light) handles the lead intake on the site forms. Every web lead lands in the foreman's inbox in under 30 seconds.
05 · Client quote
We needed a website in a week and we ended up with one in three days. The bid we were worried about, we won. Craig answered every question I had — in plain English, not consultant talk.
— Foreman, Nail City Painting