{ CASE STUDY }
Essex House Removals had been trading for ten years with six vans, spending on marketing every month without knowing what was working. Twelve months on the fleet has doubled, the site records more than a hundred enquiries a month, and Google Ads alone brought in 658 of them in a year.
Google Ads, Website Build and SEO
Southend-on-Sea, Essex
12 months
Vans on the road
Google Ads enquiries in twelve months
Enquiries tracked on the site, forms and calls, in twelve months
The work
{ THE CHALLENGE }
Spending without knowing what worked
Essex House Removals had been running for ten years with six vans on the road. Money went into marketing every month, but conversion tracking was broken, so nobody could say which enquiries came from where. The website was dated, and a large share of the work arrived through comparison sites that assigned leads rather than sending customers direct, which meant paying for every job and competing on price with everyone else on the list. The search picture told the same story. When we audited the site, the homepage carried 84% of all organic traffic and the Southend terms were already strong, but the county searches that bring in the bigger moves, house removals across Essex, Basildon, Chelmsford, Braintree, Billericay, were nowhere. The business had the fleet, the reviews and ten years of experience. It did not have a way for new customers to find it.
{ WHAT WE DID }
Fix the measurement, then the marketing
We started with the Google Ads targeting rather than a redesign, because that was where budget was being wasted week to week, and results improved before the website changed at all. Next we rebuilt conversion tracking so that every quote form, phone call and WhatsApp message was counted and attributed. From that point every decision came from real numbers instead of guesswork. With measurement working, we rebuilt the website on WordPress around one job: getting a home survey booked. Then we put SEO underneath it as the channel that compounds. In a single push we built out twenty-one Essex town pages, Billericay, Rayleigh, Rochford, Braintree, Harlow, Clacton, Brentwood, Grays, Wickford, Witham, Maldon, Leigh-on-Sea and the rest, each written to its own brief with local detail rather than a swapped-in town name, plus cost and comparison guides for the questions people ask before they book. Alongside that came the housekeeping that quietly caps a site: template links pointing at a dead typo URL instead of the real Southend page, a duplicate domain, the wrong company number sitewide.
Olly Battersby, Co-Director: “The aim was to clean up the site architecture and give it a clearer structure built around converting. On the visual side I wanted a more distinct feel and identity, without treating it like a total rebrand that took away from what Chris was already happy with.”
{ THE RESULTS }
Six vans to twelve, and a diary that stays full
The fleet has doubled. In the twelve months to August 2026 the Google Ads account delivered 658 enquiries, never fewer than thirty in a month and 83 in August alone, while the site as a whole recorded 1,352 enquiries across quote forms and phone calls. Google Ads brings in around 45% of them, organic search 35% and people typing the name in directly another 15%, so the business no longer depends on any one source, and it no longer depends on comparison sites at all. Organic search is doing the compounding. Estimated organic visits rose from 746 a month to 1,364 year on year, up 83%, and the Essex town pages now rank for removals Basildon, Chelmsford, Braintree and Billericay where the site previously had nothing. Direct enquiries have replaced the platform-assigned leads that used to fill the diary, the flow is steady rather than feast and famine, and Chris has enough confidence in the pipeline to stop discounting to win work.
Google Ads conversions, September 2025 to August 2026. Google Analytics key events (quote forms and phone calls) over the same period; channel shares from the same data. Organic visits are Semrush estimates, August 2025 against August 2026. Fleet size from the client.
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Chris Potts
Owner, Essex House Removals
