A QBCC-licensed building design studio went from invisible on Google to ranking for the custom-home and renovation searches that actually turn into projects.
The starting point
The Draughtsman builds construction-ready plans for custom homes, renovations and commercial jobs across South East Queensland. The work was excellent and the reviews backed it up, but new projects came almost entirely from word of mouth.
On Google they were nowhere. Anyone searching for a building designer in Brisbane found competitors first, so the studio never showed up at the moment people were actually looking for the work.
What we did
Built around real intent
We mapped the searches that signal a genuine project, like custom home design Brisbane and building approval drawings, and built the site structure and content to rank for them rather than chasing empty volume.
Pages that match the work
We gave each core service its own page written for homeowners and renovators, showed the kind of plans they would get, and made the next step obvious so a ranking turned into an enquiry.
Technical foundations fixed
We cleaned up the technical SEO, from site speed and mobile to titles, headings and internal links, so Google could crawl the site properly and trust it enough to rank it.
Local authority built over time
We tightened the Google Business Profile and local signals so The Draughtsman kept climbing for the South East Queensland searches that bring in real projects.
The result
Inside six months organic traffic was up ten times over, and the studio was ranking in the top three for its key services. The bigger shift was the quality of the enquiries, real projects with a budget and a timeline instead of price-shoppers.
The calendar now sits booked weeks ahead off the back of search, and the quiet stretches between referrals are gone.
“We went from nowhere on Google to choosing which projects to take on. The enquiries actually match the work we want to do.”
