From 0 Top-10 Rankings to a Page for Every Keyword: Rebuilding an Auckland Solar Electrician’s WordPress Site
Vital Energy had Master Electricians and SEANZ credentials, five-star reviews and their own drone photography. Their WordPress site buried all of it in two bundle pages. We audited it, researched the market, and rebuilt it static with a page for every service and every suburb they serve.
70 → 86
Audit score, same day
14.9s → 2.3s
Mobile LCP
65
Redirects verified
> THE PROBLEM
Our audit of the live WordPress site scored 70/100 with 37 issues. Every money service (EV chargers, batteries, switchboards, smart home, heat pumps, solar) was a section inside two bundle pages, so Google had no page to rank for any of them: 0 of 88 tracked keywords in the NZ top 10 and an estimated 101 organic visits a month.
No location pages, while "electrician west auckland" (up to 480 searches a month, $10.87 CPC, keyword difficulty 2 to 9) and "electrician north shore" (320 a month, $14.97 CPC, KD 1) went to a competitor pulling 4,816 organic visits a month. A 189-keyword gap worth 85,670 NZ searches a month sat with competitors.
The technical layer was leaking: a Unicode hyphen baked into a live URL, a published duplicate page, the footer template exposed to Google, ten duplicate URL sets, HTML injected inside the JSON-LD so the FAQ schema was invalid, an Organization entity with nine fields missing, and PageSpeed mobile at 56 with a 14.9 second LCP and 21 external scripts.
> WHAT WE BUILT
We exported the WordPress database and wrote parsers for the URL inventory, redirect map, 30 articles and the Google review cache. DataForSEO research produced 398 on-topic keywords (217,920 searches a month), each mapped to a target page before any copy was written.
The new Astro 7 site has ten service pages (one per keyword cluster, including the new commercial drone building-washing service pointed at "roof washing" and "building wash" demand rather than "drone"), four service-area pages with real suburbs and local jobs, a projects gallery of 47 of their own photos, and every article re-categorised and linked in-body to its service page.
One connected JSON-LD graph on every page: Electrician entity with credentials, memberships, offer catalogue, real reviews and a founder Person node; Service, FAQPage, Breadcrumb and Article per page. Sticky tap-to-call, intent-matched CTAs, a pre-qualifying quote form via Netlify Functions and Resend, and 65 redirect rules verified against the build so no 301 lands on a 404.
TECH STACK:
> THE RESULTS
- WMU audit score 70 to 86 (on-page 71 to 96, schema 51 to 86, AI readiness 77 to 92) on the same tool, same day
- Lighthouse mobile: Performance 56 to 98, Accessibility 91 to 100, Best Practices 77 to 100, SEO 100
- Largest Contentful Paint 14.9s to 2.3s, Total Blocking Time 349ms to 0ms, homepage 3.96MB to 0.65MB, external scripts 21 to 0
- 14 new keyword-targeted money pages (10 services, 4 areas) where there were none
- Images without alt text 516 of 680 to 0 of 555; duplicate URL sets 10 to 0; thin indexable pages 6 to 0
- Articles linking to a service page 0 of 30 to 30 of 30; valid FAQPage markup 0 to 26 pages
Measured before and after, not claimed. The same audit tool ran on the WordPress site and the new build on the same day. Rankings will be compared against the DataForSEO baseline at 30, 60 and 90 days after launch.
> QUESTIONS THIS PROJECT ANSWERS
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