Terracotta
Property
Terracotta has been a client for over two years, and the site has gone from around twenty pages to the current ninety-three. The work has covered expansions to their Services, Valuations and Building Survey offerings.
Chartered building surveyors in London. Built and maintained on Squarespace.
View live site
By the numbers
What was there
Terracotta's website was around twenty pages. One page for each service, an About, a Contact, the home page, and a small blog sitting outside all of it. For a chartered surveying firm offering everything from valuations to building surveys to party wall advice, most of what they did had no page of its own and no way of being found.
There was no site hierarchy, no analytics, and no structured approach to search. The foundations a professional firm needs were not there yet.
Structure
- Around twenty pages total, one flat page per service
- No hierarchy, every page sat off the root
- No depth beneath any service, no sub-pages
- No location or specialist content
- A small, unstructured blog outside the main site
Measurement
- No Google Analytics
- No Search Console
- No user behaviour tracking
- No way to attribute an enquiry to the website
Foundation
- No structured data or schema markup
- No SEO structure or keyword targeting
- Minimal imagery, a couple of dozen images at most
- Design no longer reflecting the size of the practice
How it was rebuilt
Rebuild and expand
The first job was to turn that thin site into something that could actually represent the practice, then keep growing it as the firm's offering grew.
- Rebuilt on Terracotta's existing Squarespace account, working against live with full backups
- Gave the site a structure for the first time, with service hubs and sub-pages beneath them
- Expanded coverage across their Services, Valuations and Building Survey offerings as the work continued
- Full-page design using custom code blocks throughout
- Mobile-first responsive implementation
- Custom Font Awesome icons integrated across the site
Technical foundation
Nothing downstream could be measured or trusted until the basics were in place.
- Cookie and privacy policy implemented, cookies scanned sitewide and missing declarations added
- Cloudflare CDN configured for improved performance
- Google Analytics and Search Console installed and configured
- Microsoft Clarity added for user behaviour tracking
- Accessibility improvements throughout
Note: the existing custom CSS contained errors that were silently preventing any new CSS from being applied at all. Removing it had almost no visual effect, which told me how little of it had ever worked. Button styling was rebuilt from scratch on the clean base.
Performance and SEO
With measurement in place, I could see what was actually holding the site back.
- 185 images optimised sitewide as the site grew, including every blog post
- Alt text written for 165+ images using keyword research drawn from their own Analytics data
- Meta descriptions written and applied across every page
- H1 hierarchy and internal linking corrected throughout
- Blog SEO infrastructure rebuilt: URLs, metadata, breadcrumbs and schema
- Body text changed from justified to left aligned for readability, reversing an earlier request once I could show why
AI search and ongoing development
Before doing this I benchmarked four competing London surveying firms. None of them was doing anything about AI search. That gap was worth taking.
- Schema markup deployed: organisation, professional service, individual services, FAQs and breadcrumbs
- FAQ content written specifically for the question shapes AI search favours
- Cloudflare configured to allow AI crawler access, and robots.txt validation errors resolved
- Google Ads campaigns planned, built, monitored and reported
- Looker Studio dashboard built so the client can see performance without logging into four platforms
In their words
Charles is a great guy and a pleasure to work with. We receive detailed updates, he delivers on time and makes great recommendations. He has become an asset to our organisation. It's a 10 out of 10 from us.
What changed
Two things matter here. How the site performs for the people who reach it, and whether the work opened up search visibility that did not exist before.
65.16%
Engagement rate
Against a sector norm of 45 to 55%.
5.33
Pages per session
Against a sector norm of 3 to 4.
47.76%
From organic search
Against a sector norm of 35 to 45%.
655
Direct contact clicks
Phone and email, over 10.5 months.
Google Analytics, 1 January to 15 November 2025
The SE1 recommendation
In November 2025 I produced a performance report for Terracotta built from Analytics, Cloudflare and Squarespace data. One of its recommendations was to build location-specific content for SE1, the firm's own patch, targeting searches like "chartered surveyor SE1" and "building survey London Bridge".
Terracotta wrote the article. I had rebuilt the blog's SEO infrastructure the month after the report: URLs, metadata, breadcrumbs and schema.
That page did not exist in the first half of 2025. In the first half of 2026 it drew 9,415 impressions from nothing. Across the five strongest articles over the same comparison, clicks went from 22 to 414.
Blocking time
When I measured the homepage in June 2025 it spent 1,270 milliseconds blocking the main thread on desktop, and 750 on mobile. The page painted quickly and then sat there, unresponsive. The cause was third-party banner code and a sitewide text-scaling feature.
Both were rebuilt. Blocking time is now 360 milliseconds on desktop and 90 on mobile, inside Google's thresholds on both. Speed Index roughly halved on each. Lighthouse SEO went from 92 to 100 on both devices.
PageSpeed Insights, June 2025 and July 2026.
AI crawler activity
The Cloudflare configuration is doing what it was built to do. In a single 24 hour sample, 26 distinct crawlers hit the site across 120 requests. ChatGPT's crawler made 47, Bing 16, Claude 14, Google 10.
That is not the same as being cited in an AI answer. It does mean the site is being read by the systems that produce those answers, which is the prerequisite, and which four benchmarked competitors had not set up.
Common questions
What does a full Squarespace rebuild actually involve?
Every page is designed and built from scratch, not reskinned from a template. That means custom layouts, a considered information architecture, mobile-first development, and all the technical groundwork: SEO, analytics, structured data, and performance optimisation. Work is staged carefully and backed up before anything goes live, so the site your customers see is never left broken mid-project.
How long did the Terracotta project take?
The initial rebuild took around 40 hours. From there the relationship moved into ongoing work covering SEO, AI search, performance and continued development. That started in September 2024 and is still running.
What does the ongoing partnership element involve?
Once the foundation is in place, the focus shifts to continuous improvement. New pages, SEO refinements, schema updates, performance monitoring, and strategic consultation. The Squarespace site is treated as a living business tool, not a completed project.
How do you measure whether the work is making a difference?
Through a combination of Lighthouse scores, Google Search Console rankings, Analytics traffic data, and conversion signals. For Terracotta, a Looker Studio dashboard was built to give the client a clear, ongoing view of performance without needing to dig into multiple platforms.
Can you do the same for my site?
Send me your URL and I'll take a look. The first review is free. I'll tell you where things stand and what would have the biggest impact for your Squarespace site. No obligation.
Did the rebuild increase their search traffic?
Search visibility grew, but I want to be precise about where from. The clearest gains came from content: five articles produced during the period went from 22 clicks to 414 between the first half of 2025 and the first half of 2026. The service pages improved their click-through rate but from a low base. Terracotta's organic search is still heavily brand-driven, which is normal for a professional services firm that gets most of its work through referral. Anyone promising you a traffic multiple from a rebuild alone is guessing.
Want results like this for your business?
Every project starts with a conversation. Drop me a line and we'll talk through what you need.