The best proof of what we do is what we did for ourselves. We rebuilt thegreatonline.com from the ground up — a fresh, fast, conversion-focused website designed for how people search today, including AI. Then we kept going. A redesign is a starting line, not a finish line, so the site has been worked on every month since, the same way we work on a client site.
The challenge
Our previous site looked the part but wasn’t built to convert. It was slower than it should be, harder to update, and it wasn’t structured for AI search or a modern lead funnel.
The rebuild
- Designed a clean, modern, mobile-first site built entirely around conversion
- Rebuilt it as an easy-to-edit WordPress site our team can update without a developer
- Structured every page for SEO and AI search with FAQ content and schema
- Mapped URLs and 301 redirects to protect our existing rankings
- Wired the site into our marketing and CRM so every lead is captured and tracked
Before & after
The homepage, old next to new:
The visible redesign is the easy part to show. These are the changes that actually move a site in search:
What we’ve done since
The rebuild launched a site worth optimizing. Everything below has happened since, in monthly passes — and it is the same programme we run for clients.
Fixed the technical foundation
- Rewrote all 254 redirect rules so ad, email and social clicks keep their tracking parameters instead of dying on a 404
- Collapsed redirect chains down to single hops so nothing leaks on the way through
- Cleaned the sitemap, corrected robots.txt, and password-protected the dev and staging environments so they cannot compete with the live site
Made every page legible to search engines and to AI
- Added ProfessionalService, business location and Service schema across the site, with pricing marked up where it is published
- Built FAQ sections into the money pages and marked them up as FAQPage, so answer engines can quote them directly
- Converted buried process descriptions into real ordered lists, because that is the shape an AI answer can actually extract
- Rewrote title tags to fit inside what Google displays, and wrote a meta description for every page
Deepened the pages that sell
- Rebuilt the organic social page around published pricing, so buyers can qualify themselves before they call
- Expanded the Google Ads page with the Colorado and Google Shopping detail it was missing
Built new pages for demand we weren’t answering
- Four Colorado town pages, each written around how business actually works in that town rather than a template with the name swapped out
- Profile Buildout and Google Business Profile Optimization, both with published pricing
- Franchise SEO, and the case studies section you are reading now
Made the results measurable
- Call tracking wired in, so phone leads are attributed to the channel that produced them rather than guessed at
- Lead notifications and CRM routing, so nothing arrives and sits
The early signal
It is too soon to claim results on traffic or leads — most of this work is months old, and some of it is weeks old. But one thing is already measurable: the number of different searches the site turns up for at all.
That is a visibility measure, not a traffic measure — it counts how many searches we appear for, not how many people arrive. It is the first thing to move when the technical foundation, the schema and the content depth all improve together, and it is exactly the pattern we look for early in a client programme. Note the shape too: it climbs, but not in a straight line — November 2025 and August 2026 both gave ground back, and we have left those dips in. The August reading is the most recent data available, and Semrush takes it mid-month — before the pages we launched in late August went live, so none of them are in it yet.
Where it stands
Search does not reward speed. Rankings move first, then impressions, then clicks and leads — usually over quarters, not weeks. The footprint above is the leading edge of that; the traffic and lead numbers follow it, and we will publish those here when they mean something. That is the same patience we ask our clients for. In the meantime, the Craters & Freighters Tampa case study shows what this programme produces once it has had a year to compound.
Want results like this?
We build and optimize websites for businesses across Colorado and nationwide. Get in touch and we will tell you honestly what your site needs.
