The challenge
A new domain has nothing to work with: no authority, no ranking history and no content. CADDrafter also faced established drafting firms, large freelance marketplaces and offshore providers all targeting the same US buyers. Technical SEO had to be right from launch, because indexing mistakes on a new site can delay rankings by months.
Strategy: depth before competition
The plan was to earn topical authority on achievable informational and service queries first, then use it to compete for harder commercial terms. Work ran in three phases.
Phase 1 · Foundation (months 1–2)
- Technical set-up: canonicals, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, Search Console and GA4.
- More than 500 queries mapped across services, industries and search intents.
- Flat information architecture with no key page more than two clicks from the homepage.
- Schema framework, including Service and BreadcrumbList markup.
- Title and description templates written for every planned page.
Phase 2 · Content and authority (months 3–7)
- Service pages for each drafting discipline, from architectural and structural drawings to shop drawings and 3D modelling.
- Informational guides answering what buyers research before outsourcing drafting work.
- Hub-and-spoke internal linking between service pages and guides.
- Answer-ready content blocks for featured snippets and AI Overviews.
Phase 3 · Optimise and scale (months 8–12)
- High-impression, low-CTR queries identified in Search Console and their titles rewritten.
- Existing pages deepened where ranking data showed semantic gaps.
- Weekly reviews of Search Console, GA4 and Semrush data.
Results
Within twelve months the site was earning around 8,000 organic clicks a month. Across the full year it recorded 62,100 clicks and 1.45 million impressions at a 4.3% click-through rate and an average position of 16.2, with more than 80 target keywords on page one. The latest 28-day window shows 8,000 clicks and 198K impressions at a 4.0% click-through rate.
Lessons learned
- On a new domain, good titles and descriptions from day one pay off in click-through rate at every ranking position.
- Informational content is not a distraction from sales pages; it builds the authority that lets them rank.
- Steady, unspectacular growth with no sudden drops is what sustainable SEO looks like.
