Case study · Contractors · Canada
General Contractor Case Study Canada: +62% Leads
How a general contractor with 2 crews in Edmonton grew estimate requests 62% and cut cost per lead 27% in 6 months with Web Development and SEO.
Illustrative case study: the business is anonymised and the figures are modelled on typical results for this market.
Contractors · Canada
Contracting
A general contractor with 2 crews based in Edmonton, serving the wider Edmonton area and focused on basement suites and secondary units, plus garden and laneway suites. Before working with us, 66% of enquiries came through HomeStars and similar paid platforms, where the same lead often went to three or four competitors. The goal was more exclusive estimate requests, a lower cost per project and a pipeline the owner controls.
Results After 6 Months
Leads per month
+62%
Cost per lead
-27%
Marketing-sourced revenue
+112%
Return on marketing spend
13.8x
The challenge
Where the business was stuck
- General contractors compete with marketplaces and handymen for the same searches, which attracts small, low-value jobs.
- Big projects come from trust and reputation, which are hard to convey online.
- Pipeline gaps between large jobs create cash-flow pressure.
- Peak season (planning enquiries peak in winter and spring) was not being planned for, so budget ran out when demand was highest.
The approach
Two services, one goal
We focused on Website Development and SEO, the two channels with the best cost per project for general contracting businesses in Edmonton. Every call, form and chat was tracked to a booked outcome from week one, so every decision was based on revenue, not clicks.
What we did
The technical work behind the numbers, service by service.
Service 1
Website Development
- Designed and built a new 57-page website on a fast, lightweight stack, replacing an outdated template site.
- Structured the site around services, locations and projects, with a filterable project gallery of 70 completed jobs.
- Hit a mobile Lighthouse performance score of 90 with compressed images, no page builder bloat and a load time of 2.3s.
- Set up 301 redirects for every old URL so no rankings were lost in the move, and connected GA4, Search Console and call tracking.
Service 2
SEO
- Technical audit and fixes: 111 crawl errors removed, mobile Largest Contentful Paint cut from 4.5s to 2.3s and indexing issues resolved.
- Built 14 dedicated service pages for high-value work such as basement suites and secondary units and garden and laneway suites, each targeting one search intent.
- Added LocalBusiness, Service and FAQPage schema and rebuilt internal linking between services, locations and guides.
- Earned 28 links from local news, suppliers, associations and community sites instead of low-quality link packages.
The numbers
Before and after
| Metric | Before | Month 6 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Estimate requests per month | 16 | 26 | +62% |
| Cost per lead | C$337 | C$247 | -27% |
| Cost per project | C$2,386 | C$1,340 | -44% |
| Lead-to-job rate | 14% | 18% | +4 pts |
| Website conversion rate | 3.4% | 7.3% | +113% |
| Marketing-sourced revenue / month | C$56k | C$118k | +112% |
| Share of leads from paid directories | 66% | 25% | -41 pts |
| Mobile page load time | 4.5s | 2.3s | -49% |
| Organic sessions / month | 1,255 | 3,028 | +141% |
Lead growth
Estimate requests per month
Marketing-sourced revenue went from C$56k to C$118k a month, measured from booked projects in the CRM.
Optimisations That Moved The Numbers
- 01
The new site's conversion rate is 3.1x the old site's, on the same traffic.
- 02
Project gallery pages became the most visited pages on the site and appear in 21% of converting sessions.
- 03
Consolidating 9 overlapping pages that competed for the same keyword doubled the surviving page's clicks.
- 04
Rewriting title tags around price and location intent raised organic click-through rate from 2.9% to 6.1%.
The 6-month timeline
From tracking to scale.
Weeks 1 to 2
Audit, tracking and baseline
Call tracking, conversion tracking, CRM connection and a full audit covering Web Development and SEO.
Weeks 3 to 6
Build and launch
Web Development and SEO live for basement suites and secondary units, plus garden and laneway suites.
Months 2 to 4
Optimise
Weekly search term, call and landing page reviews. Budget and effort moved to the jobs that close.
Months 5 to 6
Scale
Expansion into Montreal and nearby areas, plus new services with proven demand.
Illustrative case study: the business is anonymised and the figures are modelled on typical results for this market. Your results depend on your market, budget, capacity and follow-up. We share realistic forecasts in your free audit.
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