Custom Exteriors cut its marketing bill and multiplied its leads

The situation

Jonathan runs Custom Exteriors, a general contractor in Shreveport working across both residential and commercial jobs. When he came to us he was paying two bills every month, and neither one was doing what he thought it was doing.

The first was a retainer covering a hosted website and ongoing "SEO management." The website was rented — built on the vendor's platform, hosted on the vendor's account, and gone the day he stopped paying. The SEO half of that retainer had no deliverables attached to it: no content, no reporting he could read, no ranking movement anyone could point at. He was paying a subscription to keep a brochure online.

The second bill was ad spend, and it was several times larger. When we went through the billing with him, the money leaving his account and the money actually reaching the ad platform were not the same number. Roughly 40% of what he was paying as "ad spend" never bought a single click — an undisclosed markup taken off the top of the media budget before any campaign ran.

The result of a five-figure annual spend: one to two legitimate phone calls a month. The rest of the phone log was robocalls.

The website underneath it all had the same problem. Custom Exteriors had a strong local reputation and a site that didn't show it — built years earlier, never kept up with the work the company was now taking on, and noticeably weaker than what competing firms were putting in front of the same prospects. That gap costs more in construction than in most industries, because bids get evaluated by people who have never met you and who will look you up before any conversation happens.

What we focused on

Stop renting the website. The retainer wasn't buying a service, it was buying leverage over Jonathan. The fix was structural rather than clever: build the site once, as a purchased asset, on infrastructure he owns outright. That decision alone converted a permanent monthly liability into a one-time cost with nothing to renew.

Credibility before aesthetics. A contractor's prospects have very specific questions — have you done work at this scale, in this sector, recently, and can I see it. So the site was rebuilt around project evidence instead of burying a gallery page in the nav. Different project types also bring in different buyers with different worries, so each type of work got its own page aimed at the people who commission it, which gave search engines something specific to rank at the same time.

Treat performance as a conversion problem, not a scorecard. Much of the traffic arrives on a phone, often on a bad connection, often from an ad click that cost real money. A slow page doesn't just score badly, it throws away paid traffic before the page finishes painting. Speed was a constraint on every decision from the first wireframe — imagery, fonts, everything — not a cleanup pass at the end.

Build every page around the quote request. The old site treated the contact form as a destination you had to go find. The rebuild treats requesting a quote as the point of every page: proof and context placed where the hesitation actually happens, and a phone number and quote form reachable from anywhere without hunting.

Put 100% of the ad budget into media. No markup, no skim. Campaigns run in an account Jonathan owns and can log into, where he can see exactly what every dollar bought.

The approach

The build followed the usual sequence: audit what was there and what the analytics said, agree on what the site had to accomplish, design against real content on a staging URL Jonathan could open on his own phone, then build it.

Conversion tracking went in during the build instead of after. Small sequencing decision, outsized effect — measurement worked on launch day, so the first weeks of real traffic produced usable data instead of a hole in the record.

Paid search was rebuilt alongside the site and deliberately started small, well under the previous budget, so we could see which services and search terms actually converted before scaling anything up.

Custom Exteriors owns the repository, the hosting account, the ad account, and the analytics. The handover came with documentation written for whoever maintains it next. There is no monthly fee keeping any of it online.

Outcome

Measured over the first 45 days after launch, against a baseline of one to two legitimate calls per month:

• 15+ quote request forms submitted
• 30+ phone calls, with the robocall share of the phone log falling as real inquiries climbed
• Ads running at roughly a quarter of the prior monthly budget, with all of it reaching the ad platform instead of 60%
• The recurring hosting and "SEO" retainer eliminated entirely — a five-figure annual saving that now stays in the business

The comparison worth sitting with: Custom Exteriors is spending substantially less every month than it was under the old arrangement, and generated more qualified inbound in 45 days than the previous setup produced in a year. The budget that remains buys media instead of a markup, and the site it points at is an asset the company owns.

Ad spend is being scaled up deliberately from here, against conversion data rather than a guess.

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How these figures were measured. Lead counts come from the site's own analytics and call tracking, covering the first 45 days after launch. The baseline is Custom Exteriors' prior 12 months of inbound. "Leads" means quote request forms and legitimate inbound calls; robocalls are excluded from both the baseline and the result. Cost figures are stated as percentages rather than dollars at the client's preference. Published with Jonathan's permission.