From a new website to an in-house search strategy

Make a complicated business feel simple

Smartfix offered a broad range of services, and the old site had accumulated content over time without a strong hierarchy connecting the business, its services and the way customers actually looked for help.

The rebuild needed a clearer structure around services, locations and customer needs before the visual design mattered, with room for the business to keep changing.

Writing the website and steering the build

Structure

I worked with the agency on the site architecture, around Smartfix's services and customer journeys: what people needed to know, how services related to one another, and how the structure would support search later.

Keeping every page on-brand

Copy came from several hands, including an agency that wrote the suburb-specific landing pages and my marketing team. My responsibility was the brand across all of it: setting the tone, editing copy so it matched the brand guidelines, and making sure technical services read in language homeowners could understand. Across hundreds of service, location and supporting pages, each needed to sound like the same business without repeating itself.

Creative direction and feedback

I represented the brand and marketing side in project meetings, reviewed concepts and page designs, and gave feedback on hierarchy, imagery and messaging from concept to launch. The agency designed and developed the site.

After launch

I managed the site's content internally, updating pages as services changed and building new service, location and campaign pages in the CMS. The agency kept technical maintenance and development.

Search activity existed. Internal visibility didn't.

Search had built up across agencies, platforms and the website, but much of the reasoning sat outside the marketing team. Simple questions were hard to answer: which services were we prioritising, where were the content gaps, which pages were competing with each other, and how should the site change as Google and AI search evolved?

From agency contact to owning the strategy

I started by managing Smartfix's SEO agency, reviewing recommendations, performance and priorities from the business side. Over time I took on the strategy itself: analysing performance, researching opportunities, writing content, managing local search and connecting organic with paid search.

Because I also managed the website content, recommendations didn't stop at an audit. I could make the changes directly and build new pages when gaps appeared.

01Auditing what was already there

I reviewed the site structure, service and location pages, metadata and search visibility to find duplication, gaps, outdated information and weak page intent before creating anything new.

02Search intent and keyword mapping

Search research was mapped back to the services Smartfix actually wanted to sell, looking at the intent behind a search, not just its volume: the service, the problem, the location and how close someone was to enquiring.

03Articles built around real customer questions

I developed and published 24 search-led articles around the questions customers were already asking, from troubleshooting and service decisions to pricing considerations and common household problems. Each needed a reason to exist in the wider search structure and somewhere useful to send the reader next, usually a service page.

Alongside the articles, I wrote around 400 FAQs across service and location pages, phrased the way people actually search and ask.

04Optimising the pages that sell

I optimised 46 service and location pages: titles and descriptions, headings, copy, FAQs, imagery and internal links between service, location and article content.

05Local search and Google Business Profiles

I managed Smartfix's Google Business Profiles across two locations as an active channel: services, categories, descriptions, photos, reviews and regular posts, kept aligned with the website and the current service offering.

06Connecting organic and paid search

Working with the paid media specialist, I used search and business priorities to inform campaign direction, landing pages and messaging, and used paid search data to learn the language driving demand.