The starting point
Jordan Hammond runs a general contracting company in Austin with a reputation for finishing on time, which is genuinely not common in that market. The jobs were good. The pipeline was not.
The old website was slow, generic, and carried no schema. It buried the company's best work three clicks deep, and Google Ads were doing the work that organic search should have been doing.
The count that mattered: 4 qualified leads a month. The bottleneck wasn't capacity. It was discoverability.
What did discovery find?
Three problems, in priority order:
- The best work was invisible. Hammond's best work was treated as a footnote under "general contracting." Nobody searching for that work would ever find the page that proved they were good at it.
- The site and the Google Business profile weren't talking. Strong reviews on the profile, zero structured data connecting them to the site. Weaker competitors ranked ahead on the searches that pay.
- The intake form was hostile. Too many fields asked too early, before the visitor had any reason to trust the company. Leads were being turned away at the door.
What we did: three workstreams, one launch
- 1. Conversion-first rebuildThe site was rebuilt hand-coded, re-architected around the work Hammond most wants to win instead of a generic "general contracting" umbrella. The intake form went to three fields: name, project type, ZIP. Everything else gets asked after the lead lands. Launched at 98+ Lighthouse.
- 2. Local SEO programSchema markup connected the site to the Google Business profile, and service pages were rebuilt around the questions buyers actually search, not internal service categories. Lead lift from this kind of work typically starts within 30 days.
- 3. AI-search (AEO) programStructured data, llms.txt, and direct-answer content built so AI assistants can cite the company, not just index it. Across our builds, AI-search citations typically appear 6-10 weeks post-launch.
Curious how these fit together? The same three workstreams are what our web design and SEO + AI search services deliver on every build.
The numbers, plainly
No revenue projections, no "estimated pipeline value." Form and call leads in the client's own analytics, before and after. That's the whole method, and it's the same one behind every number on our case studies page.
What didn't work
AI-search citations did not show up on day one. The first mentions appeared around week seven, inside the 6-10 week window we quote, but the first month of "is this actually working?" is real. We now set that expectation on every build, in writing, before launch. Honest timelines beat optimistic ones.
In Jordan's words
"They asked me about sequencing on a remodel in the discovery call. Right then I knew this was different. Three months later, 31 leads a month. We had four."
Jordan Hammond, founder, Hammond Build Co.Hammond paid the way every client pays: $0 down, milestone draws billed after inspection, final payment after sign-off on the live site. See how the process runs and what a build costs.