EH Roofing had been operating in Edinburgh for over two decades. Their work was meticulous — traditional slating, flat roofs, zinc and lead detailing — and their reputation was strong among clients who had found them through word of mouth. The problem was that word of mouth has a ceiling. They had no website, no brand identity, and no digital presence of any kind. Homeowners and contractors searching for roofing services in Edinburgh couldn't find them. The brief was to build everything from scratch — brand, site, content — and make sure that when someone searched for roofing in Edinburgh, EH Roofing was the answer.
The starting point was the name. EH is the postcode prefix for Edinburgh — every address in the city starts with it. The client had named the business after the area they serve, which meant the brand had a built-in geographic identity that most local contractors don't have. I built the logo around that — the letters EH with a roof form embedded in the mark, so the name, the location, and the service are all present in two characters. From there, everything else followed: a site designed for the way homeowners actually search for contractors — on mobile, quickly, wanting to know if this business serves their area and whether they can trust it — and hand-coded for performance because a slow site loses that trust before the content gets a chance to build it.
I built a custom WordPress theme from scratch rather than using a page builder or off-the-shelf template. For a local contractor competing on trust and professionalism, a generic template signals exactly the opposite. The hand-coded approach also gave full control over performance — lazy loading, clean markup, fast time-to-interactive — which mattered for mobile users on variable connections.
The navigation was stripped to essentials. Services, coverage area, testimonials, contact. No blog, no about page saga, no feature bloat. The typical user arriving at a roofing site wants one of three things: to know if the contractor covers their area, to understand what services are available, and to make contact quickly. Every structural decision served that journey.
SEO was treated as a content and structure problem, not a plugin problem. The site was built with clean semantic HTML, location-specific page content, and a service structure that matched how people actually search for roofing work in Edinburgh. The ranking result came from the architecture of the site, not from bolting on an SEO tool afterward.
Google ranking for roofing services in Edinburgh within months of launch
The site ranked number one in Google for roofing services in Edinburgh. Mobile conversions increased 28% in the first three months — significant for a business that had previously had no mobile presence at all. Service inquiries grew between 22% and 32%. For a contractor whose entire previous pipeline was word of mouth, the site created a new and scalable source of leads. The brand that launched alongside it gave them something to put on vans, flyers, and correspondence — a coherent identity that matched the quality of the work they'd been doing for two decades.
This was a zero-to-one project, which meant every decision was additive — there was nothing to break and nothing to migrate. Those projects feel straightforward but they carry a specific responsibility: the foundation you build is what the client lives with for years. I'd put more structure around the content brief earlier — the service descriptions and coverage area copy went through several rounds that could have been tighter with a clearer content framework from the start.