An SEO audit that exposed a paid-for service running on a 30/100 foundation, and the full rebuild that gave a serious trades business the website it actually needed.

Air Waze UK is a Doncaster-based climate control specialist installing and maintaining air conditioning, refrigeration, and ventilation systems across Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and Greater Manchester. Founded in 2023 by Daryl Robson, the business draws on two decades of commercial climate control experience and has built a serious reputation quickly. Within months of launch, Air Waze were delivering contracts for nationally recognised large-scale contractors alongside local domestic work.

Daryl came to us with a specific question: was the SEO service he was paying his previous web provider worth the money? He also suspected the website itself had outgrown the business. We offered to do a proper audit before answering either question.

Daryl was being sold an “SEO Boost” service by his previous web provider on a quarterly cycle. Cold call, sales pitch, upgrade fee, repeat. He wanted to know whether any of it was actually working.

We ran a full SEO audit on the existing site. The results were unambiguous:

• Overall SEO score: 30/100. Critical territory.
• Content quality: 34/100. Strong AI-generation indicators across the entire site, with the same templated voice repeated across location pages and just the city name swapped.
• On-page SEO: 25/100. Duplicate meta descriptions on every page. Missing H1 tags on inner pages. Every image with empty alt text. Title tags missing service keywords.
• Schema: 20/100. No LocalBusiness or HVACBusiness schema. No review schema. No structured data of any kind.
• Performance: ~35/100. 30+ render-blocking CSS files. TTFB of ~950ms even with a CDN.
• No F-Gas registration or trade accreditations displayed. For a regulated trade with serious technical certifications, this is the kind of credibility signal that should be unmissable.

Beyond the technical failures, the site was thin. Ten pages. A single generic Services page. Location coverage limited to a list of areas with no individual pages backing them up. For a business covering multiple postcodes across three counties, with three distinct service disciplines, ten pages wasn’t a website, it was a placeholder.

The SEO service Daryl was paying for couldn’t fix any of that. You can’t optimise what isn’t there.

We quoted for a full rebuild, not as an upsell on the audit, but as the only honest recommendation. Patching a site this thin wasn’t going to deliver what Air Waze needed. The foundation had to be right.

The strategy was built around three principles.

A proper SEO foundation from the ground up. Clean technical SEO, proper schema (LocalBusiness, HVACBusiness, service-specific), correct heading structure, real metadata, fast hosting on LiteSpeed, no render-blocking nonsense. The basics done right.

Information architecture that matched the business. Three clear service pillars (Domestic Air Conditioning, Commercial Air Conditioning, Refrigeration), each with its own dedicated page and structured detail (applications, systems, brands, lead time, compliance). Not a generic “Services” page with three paragraphs.

Location coverage Daryl actually deserves. Ten core service areas across Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, each with its own page properly structured, written, and optimised for that location. With three service variants per area, that’s 30 service/location combinations built into the architecture from day one. This is how a trades business operating across multiple postcodes should appear in search.

The brand positioning was equally deliberate. Daryl’s twenty years of commercial experience, the F-Gas certification, the manufacturer training with Daikin, Mitsubishi, Samsung, Toshiba, and Midea, and the “we don’t subcontract installs and we don’t disappear after handover” operating principle were all surfaced prominently rather than buried.

• Full WordPress rebuild on the Pixelish stack. Breakdance for the build, LiteSpeed for hosting. Fast, properly cached, technically clean. No render-blocking CSS, no orphaned WordPress installs, no leftover security headers.
• Three structured service pages. Domestic AC, Commercial AC, Refrigeration. Each with applications, systems, brands, lead time, compliance, and clear next steps. Trade and domestic buyers can both find what they need without scrolling through generic copy.
• 30 location and service pages. Ten core service areas (Doncaster, Sheffield, Rotherham, Wakefield, Scunthorpe, Retford, Lincoln, Leeds, Hull, Manchester) with proper service coverage across each. Not templated content with the city name swapped, but genuinely structured local pages built to rank.
• Proper schema and trust signals. LocalBusiness and HVACBusiness schema, review schema integrated, F-Gas certification and manufacturer accreditations surfaced prominently throughout. Everything the previous site was missing.

The site launched recently and has only been live for a week. In that week, Daryl’s already had three enquiries through the new site, which is more than the previous site delivered in some entire months.

The longer-term SEO impact will play out over the coming months as Google indexes the 30 new location and service pages. Local search in trades is competitive but solvable with proper foundations, and Air Waze now has those.

Daryl’s on a Pixelish care plan with small changes included. He gets on with installations; we keep the site fast, secure, current, and growing with the business. The same engineering-first, no-cold-calls approach Daryl built Air Waze around is the one we bring to the website.