You know how some businesses are genuinely great at what they do, but nobody seems to find them online? That was exactly this situation. A London company helping landlords get their legally required safety certificates — gas checks, electrical inspections, fire assessments, all that stuff. Solid business, real demand, good reputation. And yet, barely anyone was finding them on Google.
When we first got involved, they were pulling in around 154 visitors a month. For context, that’s nothing. That’s practically invisible. And it had been getting worse for two years straight.
12 months later?
721 clicks a month. 12k people seeing them in Google search results every single month. Real, steady growth — not a lucky spike that faded the week after.
So What Was Actually Going Wrong?
Honestly, when we dug in, it wasn’t one big disaster. It was a hundred small things quietly adding up.
The website looked tired. The pages had barely any content on them like, just a couple of sentences where there should’ve been genuinely helpful information. And some pages that absolutely should’ve existed just… weren’t there. Someone in Hackney searching for a gas safety certificate? The site had nothing for them. Someone in Croydon looking for an electrical report? Same story. Those customers were going straight to competitors.
On top of that, the basic SEO stuff was broken. Page titles weren’t doing their job. Meta descriptions those little blurbs that show up under your link in Google were either missing or copied and pasted across multiple pages. Nothing linked to anything else in a useful way. And on mobile, the experience was genuinely rough, which matters a lot when most landlords are searching from their phones between viewings.
Then off the website, things were equally messy. The business name, address, and phone number were listed slightly differently depending on which directory you checked. That sounds minor, right? It’s not. Google picks up on that inconsistency and it quietly chips away at trust. There were barely any other websites linking back to them either, and no blog or fresh content being added so the site had no way to keep growing on its own.
The honest summary? A perfectly good business had basically handed Google nothing to work with.
What We Actually Did About It
We didn’t try to fix everything overnight. We worked through it steadily over the full twelve months, and honestly that’s why it worked.
- We just cleaned the whole thing up. Rebuilt the site so it loaded fast, worked properly on phones, and actually made sense to navigate. Rewrote every service page with real content the kind that actually helps someone understand what they’re getting and why they should book. Sorted out all the titles, the meta descriptions, the internal links. The unglamorous stuff that nobody really sees but Google absolutely notices.
- We sat down and figured out what people were actually searching for. The big obvious terms “gas safety certificate London,” that kind of thing were brutally competitive. But borough-level searches? Way more manageable. Landlords searching for specific services in their specific part of London were a really accessible opportunity that nobody was going after properly.
- We sat down and figured out what people were actually searching for. The big obvious terms “gas safety certificate London,” that kind of thing — were brutally competitive. But borough-level searches? Way more manageable. Landlords searching for specific services in their specific part of London were a really accessible opportunity that nobody was going after properly.
So we built those pages. A dedicated page for every type of certificate. Pages targeting the London boroughs with the most demand. A whole section for HMO landlords, people with houses in multiple occupation, who have extra compliance requirements and were almost completely ignored by competitors. And blog posts answering the questions landlords actually Google, usually in a mild panic before a tenancy starts.
We also went through every online directory and made sure the business details were consistent everywhere. Sorted the Google Business Profile properly. Got a review strategy going. And reached out to UK property blogs and trade sites to get ALC mentioned and linked from places Google already respects.
And Here’s Where It Landed
After twelve months, the numbers told a pretty satisfying story. 154 clicks a month became 721. Impressions hit 12k a month. Eight in ten visitors were coming from the UK — exactly the market they serve. And the growth was still going. Not a flash in the pan. Just a site that had finally started doing its job.
The Stuff That Really Stuck With Me
The biggest lesson from this whole project? It wasn’t some clever technical hack that made the difference. It was just building the pages that should’ve been there from the start and writing them properly. That one thing moved the needle more than anything else.
The local listing stuff surprised me too, if I’m honest. Fixing inconsistent business details across directories feels like boring admin work. But it genuinely impacted rankings. Google cares about that stuff more than most people realise.
And here’s the thing that’s still exciting — there’s a massive opportunity sitting right there in the numbers. 102,000 people see this site in Google every month, but only 0.7% actually click. If we can nudge that to 1.5% — just by writing better titles and descriptions — clicks more than double. Without ranking for a single new keyword.
The foundation is solid. The next chapter is about taking what’s already working and pushing it further. And honestly? That’s the fun part.
Need consistent clicks and impressions? Let’s make it happen.
Sr Surojit Roy