WJ Smith Construction: from an SEO audit to tracked leads

What was the problem?

The August 2026 audit scored the site 42 out of 100 for health, and the contractor’s search performance showed why. Across the whole site, Google showed it 91,723 times and people clicked 823 times, a click-through rate of 0.90%. The audit found a long list of fixable causes.

The most important finding was not about rankings. Google Analytics 4 had recorded zero real conversions for more than 12 months, so nobody could say which pages produced phone calls or enquiries.

• Both the www and non-www versions of the site were live. Fifteen www pages returned 200 but pointed to the non-www address, with no consistent redirect.
• The sitemap listed 254 URLs, 146 of them with www, about 28 duplicate pairs and a fake last-modified date.
• 132 images had no alt text in the first audit, mostly one site-wide financing banner.
• Outdated phone numbers sat in the header template and on about 100 pages.
• One redirect pointed to a domain that no longer exists, and eight empty service pages were indexed.
• 193 internal links pointed to 96 dead URLs.
• There were no AI crawler rules and no llms.txt file, and several pages were thin: a customer reviews page of 58 words, a quote page of 65 and a projects page of 112.

What did FlyRank build?

We worked in order: audit, fix, track, then publish. Nothing was left as a report on a shelf.

• Audit and fix worksheet (August 2026), with the reports kept in Google Sheets.
• Google Analytics 4 lead tracking (5 to 11 September 2026). We built a Google Tag Manager container from scratch and published version 2 on 11 September. It has tags for phone clicks and email clicks, custom dimensions, and the Google Business Profile linked to Google Analytics 4.
• A re-audit on 10 October 2026, fetching all 197 sitemap URLs slowly so the site’s rate limiting did not distort the result.
• A competitor citation scan on 10 October 2026: 24 competitors, 59 gap sites, meaning places where competitors are listed and the client is not, and 37 of the client’s existing listings to correct.
• A link-building project in seven phases, opened on 10 October 2026.
• Four rounds of fixes between 10 and 11 October 2026: a Rank Math entity fix, GeneralContractor structured data, a single H1 on all 17 pages, 410 responses on empty pages, Service structured data on eight money pages, ImageGallery structured data on the projects page, and alt text and titles on 123 images.
• Blog production: ten posts drafted on FlyRank’s prompt templates, four of them live so far. Claims in the drafts, such as prices and review counts, need fact-checking before publication, which is why not all ten are live.

What changed?

We have no ranking or enquiry outcome to report yet, and we will not dress one up. Lead tracking only went live on 11 September 2026, so there is nothing recorded to compare against. What we can state is what was recorded, and when.

• Before September 2026: no conversions tracked. From 11 September 2026: phone clicks and email clicks are tracked in Google Analytics 4.
• 10 October 2026 re-audit: 196 of 197 sitemap URLs return 200 and one returns a 301.
• 10 October 2026 Google Maps positions, a snapshot of where the business stands rather than a result of our work: number 1 for general contractor, with 81 reviews; number 3 for foundation repair; number 13 for crawl space encapsulation; number 15 for crawl space repair.
• Site health: 42 out of 100 in August 2026. A re-crawl on 18 September 2026 scored 21, but the site was rate-limiting the crawler with 429 errors, so we do not treat that number as reliable.

What happens next?

Several items are open and waiting on the client’s approval or access: titles and meta descriptions, content clusters, breadcrumbs, heading case, bulk WebP image conversion, Google Business Profile work and manual tests of what AI tools say about the business.

We will measure three things month by month: phone and email clicks recorded in Google Analytics 4, the Google Maps positions above, and the click-through rate in Search Console against the 0.90% starting point. When there is a change, it will be added here with its date.

Figures are as recorded on the dates shown. No ranking or conversion outcome is claimed.