Terry Construction
Getting an Ottawa contractor found on Google, and making sure every lead arrives.
SEO
Lead Gen
Role
Web & SEO Developer
Timeline
4 weeks
team
Owner + me
platform
WordPress
The Real Problem
Terry Construction does renovations, additions and general contracting around Ottawa. The work is excellent. The website was quiet.
It looked fine, but it wasn't built to be found. Titles didn't match what people search for, pages competed with each other for the same keywords, and parts of the site were invisible to Google.
The owner's questions were simple:
'Why don't we show up when people search for a contractor?'
'Are the forms on the site even working?'
'What should we actually fix first?'
Finding the Fix
I started with a full audit: 41 pages and 8 blog posts, checked for titles, headings, schema, links and indexing. Then I pulled the ranking data and built a keyword map, one search phrase per page, so pages would stop fighting each other.
The map showed 14 'striking distance' keywords, phrases where the site was already close to page one. 'Contractor near me' sat at position 9.5 and 'renovation contractor Ottawa' at 17.6. Those were the fastest wins.
Fix the foundations. Sitemap, robots.txt, indexing settings and broken footer links that led to 404 pages.
Fix every page. Titles, H1s, meta descriptions and thin content, across all 36 main pages.
Fix the schema. Structured data that tells Google exactly who the business is, where it works and what it offers.
Rank Math configured properly, instead of left on defaults.
Blog posts scheduled and optimised to support the service pages.
Conversion tracking so we can see which pages produce enquiries.
What Actually Happened
Then I tested every lead form on the live site, with a real submission each time, sent to a test inbox and put back exactly as it was afterwards. 7 forms, 7 passes, including one form that had never received a single entry before. It worked, it just had never been proven.
While testing I also caught a brand name typo, a fake placeholder address the theme had left on the contact page, and legal pages that were missing. Small things, but each one costs a little trust.
What Changed
The site now tells Google a clear story: who Terry Construction is, what they build and where they work.
36 pages rebuilt for search, each with one clear job.
A 59-keyword map with real starting positions to measure against.
Every lead form proven end to end, with tracking in place.
And the owner has something most small businesses never get: a plain list of what was fixed, why, and what to watch next.
What I Had to Work With
A WordPress site with history. An Elementor theme, several form plugins and a page builder that had left clutter behind.
Real competition. Ottawa contractors with years of reviews and links.
A small budget. No paid ads. Every improvement had to come from the site itself.
Honest data. Google Search Console and Rank Math, so every decision could start from real numbers instead of guesses.
What I'd Do Differently
I'd set up conversion tracking on day one. We could see rankings improve before we could see which enquiries they produced, and that order should be the other way round.
What I Learned
SEO for local businesses isn't magic. It's a hundred small, honest fixes that all point the same way.
Test the boring things. A form that silently fails costs more than a slow homepage, and nobody notices until the phone stops ringing.