A new website, pages for the main kinds of work, and customers who find him on Google

What was wrong

Oakleaf had the work and the skill. What it did not have was a website that told Google what it made. Until October, there was no page for memorial benches or custom built-ins, so people searching for either in Baltimore had no page of his to find.

What I did

A new website, and then pages for the main kinds of work he wants more of: caskets, wooden urns for ashes, furniture from your own tree, memorial benches, custom benches, custom built-ins and custom conference tables.

• Pages for the main things he makes. Six new pages went live in October, three of them written from his answers on our call, with his own photographs of the cherry, maple and striped urns, the outdoor bench and the painted chair.
• An article for a question people actually search. “How big is a casket?” answers a question searched about 250 times a month in the US for casket dimensions alone, inside the topic where the site already earns most of its Google appearances.
• The casket guide rewritten around the search it already ranked for. The pine casket guide now opens with “What is a pine box?”, the question it already ranked for, with a new title in Google.
• Behind the pages. Every photo now has a descriptive name and description, names him as the maker, and is listed for Google Images, with the old addresses forwarding to the new ones. The main image on the caskets page now appears in 1.4 seconds, down from 3.7. Link and text colours now meet the accessibility standard.
• His Google Business Profile. The service area went from three places to seven, three new services were added, and every service now has a description.

What changed

Google Search Console	September	October	Change
Clicks to the site	13	24	up 85 percent
Times the site appeared in results	963	1,525	up 58 percent
Searches the site appeared for	65	95	up 30
Searches averaging page one	28	41	up 13

In October, new work and a new prospect came from people who found Oakleaf on Google and through AI search: two through Google searches, one through the website form after a Google search, and a prospect through AI search in a browser, comparing similar makers. The website’s contact form brought in 7 genuine enquiries between the new site’s launch in August and 31 October. Google reviews went from 2 at the end of September to 5, all five stars.

What has not moved yet

Clicks are still low for the number of appearances: 24 clicks from 1,525 appearances is under 2 percent. Most of those appearances are people researching caskets and pine boxes, who mostly see the site between positions 8 and 13, where few people click. The fix is to move the pages that already exist into the top three. The casket guide rewrite was the first step, and its effect is read from 20 November.

How we measured

• Clicks, appearances, searches, positions and pages: Google Search Console, read directly from the property, 1 to 29 September against 1 to 29 October 2026, the same 29 days on both sides, read 31 October 2026 and counted by page. September reads 963 rather than the 952 given a month earlier, because Google keeps filling in recent data for a few weeks.
• How customers found him: his own words and his customers’ words, from the call of 23 October 2026, his email of 26 October and his texts of 28 October.
• Website enquiries: the website’s own form records on its host, read 31 October 2026.
• Business Profile figures and reviews: Google Business Profile performance and the Google listing, read 23 October 2026.
• Phone speed and accessibility: Google Lighthouse on the live site, 28 October 2026.
• Search volumes: a third-party keyword index, United States monthly estimates.

The comparison window was set before any number was pulled.