Fifteen years of stone, and Google had never heard of them

01 · The challenge

A finished-looking website that did nothing

Auckland is a natural-stone facade and cladding contractor with its own 1,000-square-metre fabrication facility, CNC and waterjet lines, a thirty-person team and more than 150 projects: villas, palaces and commercial towers clad in Syrian, Omani, Jordanian, Turkish and Portuguese stone. Its website, built by a previous developer on a modern stack, looked complete and was not working. The two main calls to action did nothing when clicked. The About page downloaded around 68 megabytes of video on every visit. The site listed three different addresses, which quietly undermines any chance of ranking on Maps. There were three short blog posts, no service pages, no structured data worth the name, no sitemap submitted and effectively zero pages indexed. And the domain, the code, Search Console and Analytics all lived in the developer's accounts, so the business did not control its own presence. Meanwhile the search results for stone in Qatar belonged to decades-old slab suppliers and generalist cladding firms.

02 · Objectives

What we set out to do

• Make the site work: every button, every page, fast on a phone.
• Put the domain, the code, the DNS, Search Console and Analytics in the client's own accounts.
• Be found for the stone searches Qatari buyers actually make, in Arabic and English, and be named by AI assistants.
• Turn visits into enquiries that can be counted by channel and by page.

03 · Discovery

How we found the real problem

The audit came first: every page, component, data file and script read through, three correctness bugs, five inconsistencies and six clean-up items logged, and a plain-language version written for the client. Keyword research in both languages showed where a fresh site could win and where it could not. The broad terms, marble supplier Qatar, Omani marble Qatar, were held by long-established factories and price-listing sites, the wrong fight. But Syrian stone, villa facade stone, cost and price searches, Omani stone for facades and carved columns had no clear owner in Qatar, and they are what Auckland is actually known for. Discovery also surfaced what the site had never said: founded 2011, 150-plus projects, 211,000 square metres installed, an 83 per cent referral rate, a ten-to-fifteen-year installation warranty, and a commercial registration number. The proof existed; nobody had put it on the page.

“Year one is about being found. Year two is about being chosen, by the right client.”

The plan, in two lines

04 · Strategy

The plan we committed to

Keep the site, change everything around it. A rebuild would have cost months the client did not need to spend; the stack was sound, so the work went into fixing, filling and owning. Ownership first, because nothing else is safe until the domain and the data belong to the business. Then the foundation: bugs, weight, one consistent identity, a sitemap, hreflang on every page. Then content built to rank on the winnable terms, one topical hub at a time: Syrian stone, then Omani stone, then service-plus-city pages, each project written up as a case study that links to the city page it belongs to. Then the Google Business Profile, built out fully and posted to weekly, because for a Doha contractor the map pack is where the calls come from. And from the start, everything written to be quotable by an assistant as well as readable by a person. When the numbers came in, the plan for the second year turned from being found to being chosen: a premium positioning without touching the price list.

How we approach Search & AI Visibility

05 · Design

The decisions behind the screens

The site's visual language was already there: deep navy grounds, a drone flight over a quarry behind the hero, Outfit headings in capitals, Inter for body text and Khebrat for Arabic. What it lacked was a decision. The accent had drifted between a gold and an orange-red; we settled it on the signature orange and applied it everywhere, and in September Amro formalised the whole system into a 23-page brand guideline, four colours, a twelve-file logo set in English and Arabic lockups, and an official tagline in both languages. The structural work was about proof. A rebuilt About page with the real numbers, the leadership, the facility and the warranty. A case-study template with a facts panel, a written story and a curated gallery, best work first. A call-to-action band at the foot of every product and project page with three ways to act and a trust strip beneath it. A structured quote form in place of a single message box. A full mobile menu, since the old one reached four of eight pages. And a 59-page products and services catalogue, engineering-led, with a suitability rating for every stone and every use in Qatar's climate, published as a PDF and as a bilingual web page with an interactive matrix.

How we approach Design & Development

06 · Development

What we built it on

Next.js 16 App Router, React 19, next-intl and Tailwind 4, kept and corrected. The About page's fourteen factory videos now load only when played, each behind its own poster frame, which took the page from 68 megabytes to about one. The repository lost 73 per cent of its weight in duplicates. Root-served files were excluded from the locale middleware so the manifest and verification files stopped redirecting to a 404. The content layer grew from four blog entries to a data model for six facade stones, marble and granite collections, eight project case studies, nineteen guides, ten service-and-area pages, the calculator and the catalogue, all bilingual, all in the sitemap, which went from 34 URLs to 120. DNS moved to the client's own Cloudflare account with zero downtime, unlocking company email on the domain. Search Console was verified through the code so it no longer depended on the developer, and Analytics was re-pointed to a property the client owns. A Playwright suite runs against every change.

07 · Visibility

Built to be found from day one

Nine types of structured data, LocalBusiness with the exact map identity, Product with prices, Service, Article, FAQPage, breadcrumbs, the calculator as a tool, and later a DigitalDocument for the catalogue, each verified against the page. Reciprocal hreflang on every URL. Name, address and phone unified across the site and matched to the Google Business Profile, which we built out completely: categories, bilingual descriptions and services, seven products with prices, photos and a weekly posting programme. Every page title rewritten to lead with the city and the benefit. IndexNow pushes changes to Bing within minutes, an llms.txt lets the AI crawlers read the site cleanly, and Bing Webmaster Tools was connected to count the citations. The comparison guides turned out to be the strongest asset: the Arabic Syrian-versus-Jordanian guide is the single highest-impression page, so the biggest missing comparisons, Omani versus Syrian and marble versus granite, were written next. Eight weeks in, live searches from Doha put Auckland first on all six core terms, and Google's own AI answer named it on three of them.

How we approach Search & AI Visibility

08 · Pipeline

Where the enquiries go

Every enquiry is one event with a method attached: quote form to WhatsApp, quote form to email, calculator to WhatsApp, or the sticky quote bar, plus the stone type, the project size and whether a phone number was given. Calls, WhatsApp taps, direction requests, review clicks and calculator uses are tracked separately, each carrying the page, the page type and the language. Ad blockers make these a floor, not a ceiling, and the report says so. In the four weeks to mid-August, 27 different people requested a quote from the site, thirteen opened WhatsApp and four called, while the Business Profile produced 92 direction requests and eighteen calls over the quarter. The next report changes shape: qualified enquiries, quotes and contracts as the headline, with rankings as supporting context.

How we approach Sales Pipeline