Big Bro Hardwood — 16× Organic Growth in 12 Months

Big Bro Hardwood’s old Elementor build wasn’t just slow—it was costing them rankings and leads. On mobile, pages took seven seconds to paint, Core Web Vitals bled red, and half of visitors bounced before seeing a single floor photo.

We started in Figma, mapping a cleaner information architecture and a conversion-first layout: service pages now open with social proof, cost cues, and “Request a Quote” buttons above the fold. Once the design was locked, we rebuilt the site on a feather-weight WordPress stack—custom blocks, zero unused plugins, SVG icons in place of font libraries, next-gen image formats, server-level caching, and Cloudflare CDN.

Disavowed 600+ spammy backlinks, repaired orphaned (orphaned) pages, implemented proper canonical tags, eliminated hundreds of 404s, added missing metadata and structured data, and resubmitted the sitemap for re-crawling.

This work was based on a multi-layered audit: competitive benchmarking to surface gaps vs. top regional rivals; a full technical audit covering site speed (Core Web Vitals, TTFB, resource loading), redirect logic, indexation (robots.txt, sitemap consistency, noindex usage), URL normalization, and broken links; and a crawl/structure review to validate HTML/CSS, third-party script loading, and missing foundational on-page SEO.

All findings were documented and prioritized.

We rebuilt the core content from the ground up. The homepage and every primary service page were rewritten with tight, keyword-rich copy targeting Chicago and surrounding suburbs, mapped to high-intent local queries.

On top of that, we created 150+ city-level local pages, each optimized for topical relevance and AI-friendly extraction (structured so search engines and generative models can easily crawl and pull exact answers). All content was tuned for term/frequency balance and content depth—designed to feed Google’s AI snapshots with clear, self-contained answers homeowners are searching for.

We wrote a big amount of in-depth articles and pillar pieces that now rank for dozens of long-tail keywords. They combine step-by-step explanations, service breakdowns, and practical details so Chicago-area homeowners can evaluate options and take action before picking up the phone.

To rebuild trust and local relevance, we started where Google looks first: the business profile it owns. We rewrote every field in Big Bro Hardwood’s Google Business Profile, added geotagged project photos, set a precise 35-mile service radius, and scheduled weekly Q&A posts to keep the listing active.

Next, we secured spots on high-credibility industry directories (like HomeAdvisor, Yelp) then zoomed in, placing the company on scores of Chicago-specific business indexes and neighborhood portals. Each citation carried identical NAP details and, where possible, schema-rich data.

Three months in, the backlink graph had shifted from a scatter of overseas domains to a tight, Chicago-centric cluster, and the fully optimized GMB listing began showing up in the snack-pack for queries like “hardwood floor refinishing near me” and “oak floor repair Chicago”.

Weekly Semrush checks flagged quick wins; GA4 dashboards kept the client in the loop on traffic and engagement.