Rebuild
From 16th to 4th for “edmonton interior designers”.
Stephenson House · Edmonton & Vancouver
An interior design firm whose work runs from downtown penthouses to country estates, coming back a second time after rebranding. The site had to carry the new identity, sell in a category where people take their time, and leave room for a store that did not exist yet.
Rebuild
SEO
Interior design
The engagement
- ClientStephenson House, Edmonton AB
- IndustryInterior design · retail
- What we didContent strategy · Information architecture · Copywriting · Design · WordPress development · SEO · CRM · E-commerce
- EngagementJuly 2021 · the second project with this client
The challenge
Stephenson House designs for urban infills, downtown penthouses and country estates across Edmonton and Vancouver, and for vacation properties a good deal further afield than that. When Katie Stephenson rebranded the firm, the website was the part that had not moved with it.
Design is a considered purchase and a slow one: people look for a long time before they enquire. That puts weight on two things the old site was not doing — being found by someone starting from a search rather than a referral, and being legible enough, once found, that the work speaks before the contact form does.
What we did
- The new brand, carried properly. Design and content worked on together so the site matched the rebrand rather than approximating it, with the copy rewritten rather than poured into a new template.
- Navigation simplified. Information architecture reworked so the portfolio is the thing you land in, not something you go looking for.
- Enquiries made countable. Google Analytics configured around the signup forms, so the firm could see which work actually produced contact rather than guessing from traffic.
- Room to sell later. Campaign Monitor for the mailing list at launch, and a Shopify store added in a second phase once the retail side was ready — planned for rather than retrofitted.
The result
16 → 4
Position for “edmonton interior designers”, shortly after launch
Ranking as reported at the time of launch, 2021 · predates the rank tracking we would now source it from
The firm’s own account of the launch puts the move at 16th to 4th for its main local term. It is the one figure this engagement produced and it is published here with the caveat it deserves: it comes from the record kept at the time rather than from a tracker we can re-query today, which is a weaker source than the ones behind the other case studies here.
What is not in dispute is the rest of it — a site that matched the brand, a navigation people could use, conversion tracking where there had been none, and a retail channel added later without rebuilding anything.
Is this your situation?
A firm whose reputation travels by referral but whose website has to work for everyone else is the situation this work is built for.