SEO audit data on a laptop for WJ Smith Construction

WJ Smith Construction: SEO and AEO audit, lead tracking and content

A North Carolina contractor with a live site, a year of traffic and no way of seeing which visits turned into enquiries. We audited the site, repaired what was broken and set up lead tracking and answer-led content.

Get your free audit All case studies
  • Client: wjsmithconstruction.com
  • Greenville, North Carolina
  • SEO, AEO, tracking and content
Planning session for a local contractor SEO and AEO programme

The client and the challenge

WJ Smith Construction is a family-owned contractor in Greenville, North Carolina. It offers general contracting and remodelling, plus crawl space and foundation repair, and serves Greenville and the towns around it.

The site had traffic but no measurement. Google Analytics had recorded no real conversions for more than a year, so nobody could say which pages produced calls or form fills. Search visibility was also uneven: the business was strong for general contractor searches but weak for crawl space and foundation repair, the services it most wanted to grow.

  • Rank locally for crawl space, foundation and general contracting terms.
  • Be named in AI answers for those services.
  • Measure calls, emails and form leads for the first time.

What the audit found

Our August 2026 audit scored the site 42 out of 100. These were the findings that mattered most.

Duplicate www and non-www pages
Fifteen www pages returned a normal response and relied on canonical tags, with no consistent redirect to the main version of the site.
A bloated sitemap
254 URLs, including duplicate pairs, over a hundred redirecting service-and-town combinations, invented last-modified dates and no reference in robots.txt.
No structured data
No LocalBusiness, Service, Breadcrumb, Review or Person markup anywhere on the site.
132 images missing alt text
Including a financing banner repeated on every page.
Thin and mismatched pages
The reviews page had 58 words, the quote page 65, and the projects page carried an extra H1. Titles and descriptions ran long and headings were inconsistent.
Weak signals for AI answers
No AI crawler rules, no author bylines and little evidence of expertise on the page, which scored low on our answer-engine review.
Broken and inconsistent details
A malformed phone link, several different phone numbers across the site and listings, and a link to a roofing domain that no longer exists.
Unverified local listings
Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple and directory citations had not been checked for consistent name, address and phone details.

What we did

The site is live with a year of history, so we repaired and extended it rather than restructuring existing URLs.

  1. Fix what was broken

    Redirected www to the main domain, cleaned the sitemap, repointed or removed dead internal links across 86 pages, and noindexed the project post type that duplicated the projects page.

  2. Make the site readable to search

    Moved every audited page to a single H1, added alt text and titles to 123 images, and rewrote 94 titles and descriptions. LocalBusiness and Service structured data went onto the money pages.

  3. Set up lead tracking

    Built a Google Tag Manager container to record phone clicks and email clicks with their position on the page, and created matching Analytics dimensions. Form lead tracking is the remaining piece.

  4. Write answer-led content

    Drafted a ten-post plan for crawl space, sump pump and foundation topics in an answer-first format. Seven live posts were refreshed with key facts and clearer local detail, and a foundation hub of scheduled posts followed.

  5. Plan the off-page work

    Scanned 24 local competitors for citations and listed the directories and listings to clean up or add, ready for a staged link and citation build.

Results so far

Results are being tracked; we will publish verified numbers here. Lead tracking only started in September 2026, so there is no before-and-after enquiry figure yet.

Baseline in AI answers
In a logged-out test of 19 prompts, the business was the brand most often named overall, but was missing from every foundation and pier answer. That gap is the target of the foundation content hub.
Baseline on Google Maps
First for general contractor searches, with weaker positions for foundation repair and crawl space terms.

Services used on this project

Get the same audit for your site

A clear review of your site with a prioritised fix list, whether or not you work with us.

Get your free audit flyrankseo@gmail.com