Field Notes
Thirty years of watching this industry contradict itself. No listicles, no ‘ultimate guides,’ no content written to rank for a term I don’t care about.
The work
Six sites, taken apart.
Three were paid engagements, anonymized under NDA — the industry, the market size and every number are real, the name is not. Three were teardowns: public sites I diagnosed for free because nobody asked me to. The second set is the more honest half, because there was no client to please.
They were optimizing for the 30% of conversions that didn’t matter.
Six locations. Every report counted form fills. Ninety percent of their booked jobs started with a phone call nobody was measuring.
Read itCase studyGoogle was crawling 340,000 URLs to find 11,000 products.
Faceted navigation had multiplied the catalog thirty times over. Most of the store had never been indexed at all.
Read itCase studyThey ranked first and still couldn’t get anyone booked.
Top three in every market. A booking widget that rendered a blank white box on half the devices that reached it.
Read itTeardown$3,000 a month in ads, landing on a page that lost three buyers in four.
The ads were fine. The site behind them was the problem, and nobody in the building could say which half of the budget worked.
Read itTeardownRanked #1 for the term that matters. Nineteen hours to answer an inquiry.
The rankings were real. Everything downstream of them was theater, and the median response time was doing the losing.
Read itTeardownRanking for its own name, and nothing anybody searches for.
The keyword report looked healthy until you crossed out every brand term. One row was left standing.
Read itRather skip to the answer?
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