Home/The Build Log

Field notes from a vertical web studio.

Playbooks, post-launch breakdowns, and field notes from building 24 sites for the construction industry. Written by the team. No SEO bait - every post answers a real question we got from a real client.

Posts live6
Cadence~2/month
AuthorsMarcus, Priya, James
Subscribers1,840
FEATURED · 04.18.2026
SEO·16 min read

Construction SEO 101: why your local pack is the only ranking that matters.

A 4,000-word breakdown of the local-pack mechanics specifically for service-area construction businesses. Why review velocity beats review count. Why your service-area schema is wrong. Why kitchen-and-bath remodelers should never optimize for "general contractor."

Priya Patel · SEO Lead
Read the playbook →
- Recent posts

All entries.

Filter by category. Long-form playbooks, post-launch breakdowns, and field notes from in-flight projects.

All · 6 SEO · 2 Conversion · 1 Process · 2 Tooling · 1
Conversion

The 11-field contact form that priced out 70% of Hammond's leads

How a $50K-floor budget dropdown was killing the funnel - and what we replaced it with. With before/after numbers from the Hammond Build Co. rebuild.

04.04.2026
SEO

The AI-search guide for contractors: showing up in Perplexity + ChatGPT

Schema patterns, citation-dense FAQ structures, and the three things every construction site needs to be quotable by an LLM. Includes our internal checklist.

03.21.2026
Process

Why we kill projects in week 4 (and you should too)

Architecture sign-off as the cheapest off-ramp in the building. We've ended 3 projects there in the last 18 months. Both sides walked away grateful.

03.07.2026
Tooling

The Sanity vs Webflow CMS decision, for the 30th time

Why we ship Sanity for every build, even when the client asks for Webflow. The 4 questions we ask to be sure. With a Webflow exception we just made.

02.18.2026
Process

Friday demos: a small ritual that prevents 80% of project blowups

The 15-minute screen-share that turned a chronic late-stage-surprise problem into a non-issue across our last 12 builds. Anyone can copy this.

01.30.2026
SEO

Service-area schema for contractors: the markup nobody ships

The exact schema.org JSON-LD pattern we ship on every build, why it's different from the cookie-cutter LocalBusiness schema, and what local-pack rankings did when we shipped it.

01.12.2026

Read the case study that started the blog.

Hammond Build Co. - 4 leads/mo to 31 leads/mo, written up like a case study, not a brag reel. Same playbook is in the SEO 101 post.

Read the Hammond case study12-min read · Published Apr 4