PROOF · CASE STUDY

From renting customers to owning the shelf

How a family-run timber merchant grew online revenue ~10x, and stopped depending on ads.

The situation

A family-run timber merchant was quietly bleeding money. Their website wasn't really a website. It was a shopfront bolted onto an ancient inventory system. Slow, dated, clunky on a phone. The kind of site you land on and instinctively hit back.

Worse: nobody was watching the money. A salaried "web guy" kept the old site ticking over, but profit wasn't his problem. He was paid to maintain, not to grow. Meanwhile, every summer they were spending thousands a month on Google Ads just to keep sales coming in.

Every sale had a Google Ads tax stapled to it. Online revenue sat in the low thousands a month, and the reporting was so loose nobody could trust even that figure.

The problem wasn't traffic. They were paying to exist.

What we did

  • Scrapped the old site and rebuilt on Shopify from scratch. Fast, clean, built for the customer instead of the stockroom.
  • Found the real leak. It was the checkout, not the traffic. Fixed the self-inflicted damage, including a shipping charge quietly killing conversions on cheaper items.
  • Went after the free traffic they'd been ignoring: proper SEO on the money pages, structured data so Google and AI tools understand what they sell, internal linking, and a content structure that funnels every visit toward the sale.

The result

BEFORE
Low thousands £/month online
AFTER
Tracking toward £35k/month
BEFORE
Core product page at position ~9
AFTER
Top 3 on Google, with a cluster of related terms alongside
BEFORE
Growth dependent on ad spend
AFTER
Growth from organic search, the free stuff

Revenue grew roughly 10x. And because the growth came from organic search, they stopped setting fire to their ad budget every summer to hit the same numbers.

The old setup was renting customers from Google. The new one owns the shelf.
WHAT THE OWNER SAYS
"I cannot thank Matt enough for the changes he's made to our online performance and image. The progress he's made in such a short time is amazing. I would not hesitate in recommending him for all your website design and SEO requirements."
— Owner, family-run timber merchant

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