JHDS Plumbing & Tiling

Fifteen years, three phases, one working relationship

John Horton has been plumbing and tiling for over 15 years. City and Guilds qualified, fully insured, and the kind of sole trader who takes on the small jobs that bigger companies won't touch. His reputation was built on word of mouth and five-star reviews across Google and Rated People.

What makes this case study a little different is that it is not a single project. Gary and John have been working together since 2011. Over that time the business has changed, John's location has changed, and the web has changed. Each time, the site has been adapted to match. Three distinct phases, fifteen years apart, all pointing in the same direction.

A proper website, built to rank in Edinburgh

Before 2011, John had a website. It just was not doing much. It was not built for mobile, it was not ranking for any meaningful local searches, and it was not converting the visitors it did get into enquiries. For a sole trader relying on local customers finding him online, that was a significant problem.

The first project was about fixing the foundations. A site built properly for mobile, structured around the search terms Edinburgh customers were actually using, and set up to rank for plumber and tiler searches across the city. No gimmicks, just the basics done well.

It worked quickly. Within a few months of launching, John was receiving a consistent stream of organic enquiries from customers finding him through Google. Edinburgh was delivering.

John moves to Dunblane — the SEO challenge that followed

A few years after the 2011 build, John relocated from Edinburgh to Dunblane. For the business, it meant a shift in working area. Stirling, Dunblane, Falkirk and the surrounding central Scotland towns became the primary patch. Edinburgh remained part of the picture, but it was no longer home base.

This created a specific SEO problem. The site had been built to rank in Edinburgh, and it was doing that well. Simply redirecting everything at Stirling risked losing those Edinburgh rankings, which still represented real enquiries and real work. What was needed was a careful rework, not a rebuild.

The approach was to expand coverage rather than replace it. New content and structure for Stirling and the surrounding area, built alongside the existing Edinburgh focus. Each location with its own clear signals, so Google understood John covered both without the two competing against each other. This is the kind of local SEO work that requires careful planning to get right.

Edinburgh held. Stirling started ranking. The workload shifted to reflect where John was actually based, without the cliff edge that can come from changing a site's local focus.

A complete redesign — built for where the business is now

By 2026, the site had done a lot of good work over fifteen years. But it was showing its age. The design reflected a different era of the web. The technical underpinnings were WordPress with accumulated plugin overhead. The visual identity did not match the quality of John's actual work. It was time for a full rebuild rather than another round of patches.

The 2026 redesign kept everything that had worked — the local focus, the honest tone, the service depth — and rebuilt everything else from scratch. New design, new codebase, new performance baseline, and enhancements to every part of the site that had been added in layers over the years.

Organic enquiries increased just as they had in 2011

The pattern held. Just as the 2011 build brought consistent enquiries within a few months, the 2026 rebuild did the same. Organic enquiries increased across Edinburgh, Stirling and the newer Glasgow coverage, and the quality improved too — the site pre-selects for the right customers before they make contact.

Someone landing on the regrouting page already knows that is the service they want. Someone finding John through the Dunblane or Stirling location page already knows he covers their area. That specificity cuts down the back-and-forth and gets to the actual job faster.

Still the same working relationship fifteen years later

The thing that stands out across all three phases is that John kept coming back. Not because he had to, but because the work delivered. The ongoing relationship since the 2026 rebuild covers:

• Search Console monitoring Page indexing, crawl status and search performance are checked regularly. When something needs attention it gets dealt with, not added to a backlog.
• Location coverage tracked and expanded As John's working area evolves, new pages get built and existing ones get updated. The site reflects where the business actually is, not where it was when the site launched.
• Reviews added as they come in New reviews from Google and Rated People are added to the site regularly. Social proof that is a year old is less convincing than social proof from last month.
• Performance maintained as standards move Image formats, load speed and Core Web Vitals are checked as Google's requirements shift. A site that performed well at launch should still perform well two years later.
• A fourth project being discussed John has a separate business venture in the works and is already in conversation about applying the same approach to it. Coming back a fourth time after fifteen years is the most honest review there is.

If you want to see what this kind of work looks like for your trade and your area, check which locations we cover or get in touch with Gary directly. Packages start at £99.