First Choice Grout & Tile was my first ever client. Adrian Leahu, the founder of First Choice, gave me the job to create his entire branding, from logo, website, vinyls, stickers decals, and printed materials.

Over time I've helped him revitalize his site with my new skills, evolving his site while I evolved my career. This last iteration was a culmination of many of my skills, but was heavily geared toward Search Engine Optimization. His previous site was considered by some of his competitors and clientèle to be "best-in-class" design-wise. But unfortunately it was not best-in-class for ranking on search engines.

There was a laundry-list of changes that needed to be done to help First Choice rank higher. I put together a comprehensive, three-phase rollout of SEO work that would prove invaluable to his business in the coming months.

Alongside the SEO, I felt it appropriate to re-design the site to match his current brand position and have the same look-and-feel as many of the marketing pieces we've done.

Below are some screenshots of the new design.

The homepage features different feeds "at-a-glance". Users can see a list of services, latest testimonials, and coupon deals right from the homepage. The site also has an initial mission statement as well as a rotating set of images showing some of the capabilities First Choice offers.

The gallery page features before and after images, as well as project profiles available in a slideshow.

Samples are also available, showing a wide spectrum of choices.

All the various services, broken up into readable columns.

A new feature: testimonial pages. This increases SEO, added more authority, and showcased some of the amazing things customers had to say about First Choice.

A custom contact form was added, as well as basic SEO friendly “ABCD” info, making it easy to get a hold of First Choice.

Other things like recurring coupons, suppliers and vendors that First Choice works with, employment opportunities and FAQs were added. A new section "submit a review" was added, which gave customers the ability to give reviews and earn a coupon for future work. This enforces loyalty and gives customers an opportunity to continue using First Choice as their go-to service. It also has a survey that allows First Choice to find out where it's strong or weak points are, to better their service for future customers.

SEO work done

Phase 1: generic SEO

As mentioned, I went through a three-phase rollout, which is ongoing. The first phase was basic optimization. Things like keywords, title tags, alt tags were optimized. The site was re-designed parallel to all of this, so adding content immediately increase visibility because tons of new pages were able to be crawled by search engines.

Phase 2: location specific SEO

I also added "ABCD" info on all the pages to increase local search results, added the site all major search engines, included listing, photo and metadata info on all major "10-pack" listings for Bing, Google and Yahoo. I also rewrote the content and titles for location specific keywords that correspond to other relevant site data.

Phase 3: blogging, social networking, new brand rollout.

Phase 3 involves the introduction of social networking into the mix. Facebook, Twitter, authoritative blog postings and the intricate tasks inherent in each are planned for completion.

First Choice is also working on new markets in the tile and restoration field that will involve integrated branding. I will be spearheading that movement and designing all the pieces, as well as marketing focus and continued SEO efforts.

What does this mean?

These efforts mean an increased bottom line and increased complements. Through these efforts, First Choice has changed in rank considerably, and has jumped from several pages back to first page results in a matter of months. These results yielded instant results, doubling and quadrupling leads in under 6 months. Call rate went up 400%, with "conversion" rate near 150-200%.

The immense content improvements, gallery adoption, customer testimonials and vendor relationships have given First Choice a more trustworthy image, while retaining original clients and shining light on various projects that were not featured before.