Local SEO case study: from rented website to ranking local brand.

Award-winning work. Invisible online.

Outback Construction is a family- and veteran-owned general contractor in Lebanon, Tennessee. They build custom homes, in-ground fiberglass pools, pool houses, and complete backyard living spaces across Wilson and Williamson County. They are one of the only builders in their market who can deliver the pool, the pool house, the outdoor kitchen, and the grading under one contract from a licensed general contractor.

Their work is exceptional. Imagine Pools, a national fiberglass pool manufacturer, named their Mt. Juliet build its national Pool of the Month. But online, almost none of that showed. Their website lived on a rented platform owned by someone else, and their visibility in local search fell far short of the quality of what they build.

The problem: renting your presence.

Outback's website lived on a rented platform. The provider owned the pages, controlled the DNS (the plumbing that connects a domain name to a live site), and held the whole setup behind their walls for a monthly fee. Every change ran through the provider, and the day the relationship ended, all of it stayed behind.

It showed. Gallery captions still carried the platform's placeholder text. Project photos sat unlabeled where Google could read nothing. A builder holding a national award had almost no visibility for the searches homeowners in their own county run every week.

Renting a website is the norm for small businesses and a quiet liability. You can pay for years and walk away owning nothing. It is the problem our Website Design & Rebuild service exists to fix.

What we did

The escape

We moved Outback's domain onto a registrar and DNS they control, connected it to the new site, and verified Google Search Console the same night. They own the registrar, the DNS, and the site outright. No provider holds any piece of it.

The rebuild

We replaced the rented site with a 21-page build designed around how homeowners in Middle Tennessee search: dedicated service pages for custom homes, pools, pool houses, and backyard living; city pages for Lebanon, Mt. Juliet, and the surrounding markets; and real project case studies with the photography their work deserves. Every retired URL was redirected properly so nothing Google knew about them was wasted. The new site loads in about 1.3 seconds and carries structured data that tells Google exactly who Outback is and where they work.

The foundation for growth

With the site live, we audited every page, mapped their keywords against every competitor ranking in their market, and built a Google Business Profile strategy around their national award. We rebuilt their email on Google Workspace with proper authentication so their messages land in inboxes instead of spam folders. All of it feeds a six-month local SEO roadmap that starts with lead tracking, so every form fill and phone call gets counted, and ends with one goal: page-one visibility across Wilson County and a lead pipeline they can see in a report instead of guessing at.

Week three: the first signs.

In the first full week of tracking, Google showed the new site 873 times and earned 26 clicks. It reached position 11 for "custom home builder lebanon tn," the top of page two, with a 27 percent click-through rate. Domain Rating went from 0.5 to 11 as the first links landed, including two from Imagine Pools' national award story about the Mt. Juliet build.

That is where this case study sat when we first published it. Here is what changed.

Week ten: second of 76 builders, across 400 square miles.

Domain Rating is now 16, from 175 referring domains. But the number that matters for a builder is not on any organic report, because tools like Ahrefs cannot see the Google map pack. So we measured it directly.

On 2 August 2026 we ran a Local Falcon grid scan for "custom home builder lebanon tn": 49 search points in a 7 by 7 grid, 3.33 miles apart, covering a 10 mile radius. Every pin is a real search from that coordinate.

Outback appears at all 49 points and ranks top three at 44 of them, average rank 2.24, 89.8 percent share of local voice. They are strongest in the ring around Lebanon rather than on top of their own pin, which is what a builder wants: the customer with land to build on is rarely standing downtown.

One builder is ahead. Stewart Knowles Construction holds 100 percent share of voice at a 1.29 average rank. Second place here is a long way clear of third, at 36.7.

Further down the same table: of the 76 builders tracked in this market, only 12 have any measurable share of local voice. Eighty four percent are invisible for the search that defines their business, which is the finding from our 11,534 business audit playing out in one market.

Reviews did not decide this, and everyone assumes they do.

Outback has 17 reviews. Against the other custom home builders in this town: Reid & Co. Construction has one review and sits third at 36.7 percent. Ryan Stephens Custom Homes has none and still appears at all 49 points with 14.3 percent. Moss Homes has 20, more than Outback, and scores zero.

Reviews decide whether somebody picks you once they can see you. Category accuracy, service area configuration, and profile completeness decide whether you appear at all.

17 reviews is still low, and it is the clearest weakness in this profile. Garner Construction at 83 and Horizon at 51 have social proof Outback does not. Review velocity is the next piece of work. It is not the piece that produced the position.

And one lead from an AI assistant.

On a call on 3 August 2026 one of the owners told us an inbound enquiry had come from ChatGPT. Someone asked an AI assistant for a builder and Outback came back. That prospect is meeting this week to walk through a vision board and start planning.

Nothing is signed, and it is one lead. It is also a lead that came from an AI assistant in the same year our audit found not one business in 11,534 ready to be recommended by one.

The takeaway

Outback Construction now owns every piece of their online presence: the domain, the DNS, the website, the analytics, and the strategy. Nothing sits between them and their customers. That ownership sits under a market position their competitors will have a hard time answering: the only award-winning builder in their area who delivers the entire backyard under one contract.