Puget Sound Painting

A Bellingham painting contractor, working on homes and businesses since 1997. We replaced a dated Duda site with a bespoke WordPress build, then spent the months since launch turning it into a steady source of local work.

8x Search visibility compared with the old site

4.8 Google position for commercial painting in Bellingham, up from 15.0

14 Customer quote requests since launch in August

Puget Sound Painting website on a laptop: painters who answer the phone, across Whatcom and Skagit County

The brief

Puget Sound Painting had a dated Duda website that Google barely showed. It earned about 650 search impressions a month and almost no visits from search.

The company paints homes and businesses across Whatcom and Skagit counties. They needed a site that wins local searches, turns visitors into quote requests, and that their own team can keep up to date.

The website

A bespoke WordPress theme, built from scratch. There is no page builder, parent theme or CSS framework. Gutenberg is removed entirely, and every page is assembled from a library of 37 content sections built with ACF Pro. The team can build or rearrange any page in the admin without touching code and without breaking the design.

A design system that reads like a painter’s spec sheet. We built a marine palette in navy and cyan, set in self-hosted Fraunces, Instrument Sans and IBM Plex Mono. The pages use square drawdown color swatches, a scope card that sets out what is included and what is quoted separately, and an interactive before and after slider for project photos.

There is no stock or AI imagery anywhere. Every photo is of the company’s own work.

Built for local search

Every page was planned around the searches Puget Sound Painting needs to win, the same approach we take in all our SEO work.

7 service pages, including a commercial painting page added after launch from search data
12 town pages covering Bellingham, Ferndale, Lynden, Mount Vernon, Burlington, Sedro-Woolley, Anacortes, Blaine, Birch Bay, Everson, Sumas and Bow
9 project case studies, each with a spec table, before and after photos and the colors used
A blog built into the theme, with 7 articles live
Structured data for the business, services, projects, FAQs and breadcrumbs, plus a self-referencing canonical on every page
A full 301 redirect map from the old Duda site, including its wildcard and legacy mobile URLs, so existing rankings carried over to the new pages

Built to convert

Five Gravity Forms: full quote, fast quote, commercial inquiry, contact and careers. Each has its own thank-you page, team notification and auto-reply, sent through authenticated SMTP.
Every form fires its own Analytics event, so a commercial lead, a homeowner quote and a job application are reported separately.
A click-to-call phone number and a quote button on every page.

Puget Sound Painting free quote form on a phone

Performance and accessibility

CSS is 11 KB and JavaScript 3.4 KB gzipped, with no jQuery on the front end.
Images are served as AVIF and WebP through a responsive picture helper, and critical CSS is inlined.
Built to WCAG 2.2 AA, with a visible focus ring, a keyboard operable mega menu and before and after slider, reduced motion respected and 44px tap targets.
A site health score of 96 out of 100 at the one month audit, with zero errors.

Puget Sound Painting website on a desktop, laptop, tablet, phone and watch

Since launch

Month one: migration and audit

We fixed a stale redirect that was hiding the Contact page from Google, recovered five legacy URLs that were returning not found errors, and asked Google to recrawl the old addresses. We cut image weight by 89%, switched on inquiry tracking and delivered a 30 day plan.

Month two: local signals

Google Business Profile completed to “Looks good”, with a new description, hours, services including commercial, and job photos.
A commercial painting page, because commercial searches were the largest group of searches with no page to land on.
Internal linking, with the Bellingham page now linked from every service page.
Rank tracking refocused on Bellingham map pack results.
Facebook rebuilt, with 12 designed posts a month made in a Figma post system.

Ongoing

A weekly blog schedule with topics chosen from Search Console data, a recommended contractors section for referral partners, and monthly search reports.

The results

From Google Search Console, comparing the first 28 days live (August 18 to September 14) with the latest 28 days (September 27 to October 24). Search visibility is up about 8x on the old site. The latest month is lower than the launch month because the old www addresses are dropping out of Google, as planned once the redirects took effect.

4,942

Monthly search impressions, up from about 650

15.4

Average position, up from 18.6 at launch

0.53%

Click-through rate, up from 0.33%

Clicks in the latest 28 days, up from 20

Rankings since launch

✓"commercial painting bellingham wa" from position 15.0 to 4.8

✓"industrial painting bellingham wa" from position 11.5 to 6.6

✓"painters bellingham, wa" at position 3.0

✓The Bow town page averaging position 2.9

✓10 of the 11 town pages tracked since the audit have climbed

✓Sedro-Woolley from 23.9 to 8.4

✓Burlington from 30.4 to 11.5

✓Mount Vernon from 22.5 to 11.5

✓Anacortes from 35.4 to 22.5

✓Lynden from 40.8 to 29.9

✓Ferndale from 50.2 to 38.7

Leads

14 customer quote requests have come through the site since launch, with test submissions excluded. Commercial, contact and careers inquiries are tracked separately. October is the best month so far, with 7 quote requests by the 24th.