Red Door Marketing Co. · SEO Engagement · Strategy Reference
What the Old Site Did — and What the New One Is Built to Do
Professional Brick & Stone Works (pbasw.com), Anna, TX. A side-by-side of the old WordPress sitemap and blog against the new site architecture and content strategy — every claim about the old site verified against its live sitemaps and search results in August 2026, every claim about the new site verified against the shipped build.
Contents
1The One-Paragraph Version
The old site proved the domain can rank — its flagstone blog post sits at #1–2 in North Texas — and then routed none of that strength anywhere useful: 164 near-identical city pages Google ignored, 60 blog posts with no links to the pages that sell work, and zero presence on any commercial search we tested, including "pool repair Anna TX" in the company's own hometown. The new site keeps every proven ranking asset, prunes what Google was learning to distrust, and wires everything — sitemap, city pages, blog, internal links — toward one measurable outcome: appearing where DFW homeowners search for the work PBASW actually sells.
2The Sitemap: Then vs. Now
| Old pbasw.com (WordPress + Yoast) | New site (verified live on staging) | |
|---|---|---|
| Total URLs | 274 | 971 (+ strategy pages) |
| Structure | 3 auto-generated files; 206-URL page sitemap mixing core pages with 164 city pages | Organized index: pages · locations · location-services · blog, each sorted and human-readable |
| City pages | 164 templated | 72 cities differentiated |
| City × service pages | 0 | 857 indexable |
| Compliance gating | None — every city claimed regardless of registration status | Cities with unresolved registrations excluded from the sitemap and noindexed until cleared |
| Junk in the index | "Uncategorized" archive, duplicate reviews pages, duplicate service stubs | None; one canonical URL per topic |
Why the old number being smaller doesn't make it better: the old 164 city pages were generated the same day from one template — 1,708 words for McKinney, 1,713 for Anna, same headline pattern throughout. None surfaced in any local search tested. That's the "doorway page" pattern Google's spam policies target: volume without substance, a liability compounding quietly. The new footprint is larger and structured: every city page is written from real local facts (county, neighborhoods, housing stock, topography), every city×service page targets a real search ("stamped concrete contractor Plano"), and the pages Google shouldn't see yet are deliberately kept out of its view.
3What the Old Approach Earned in Search
Directional probes run August 15, 2026 — the scoreboard this engagement is measured against:
| Search term | Old pbasw.com result | Who ranked instead |
|---|---|---|
| flagstone patio installation North Texas | #1, #2, #6 | — (their own blog + service pages) |
| pool repair Anna TX (hometown) | ABSENT | Braddock, Hauk, Tropix, Texas Clear Pools |
| outdoor kitchen contractor McKinney TX | ABSENT | Keane, Bobcat, Pristine, Carlton's |
| pool renovation contractor Frisco TX | ABSENT | Riverbend Sandler, Blue Science, Hauk |
| stamped concrete contractor Dallas TX | ABSENT | McFall, North Dallas Concrete, Keane |
| brick mailbox installation DFW | ABSENT | Brick Experts DFW, Legendary, Borders |
One win out of six — and the win is informational, not commercial. 164 city pages produced zero of these results. That is the clearest possible evidence that page count was never the problem or the solution.
4The Blog: Then vs. Now
Old blog — an engine pointed at nothing
- 60 posts, disciplined biweekly cadence — genuinely good content discipline.
- Produced the site's only proven ranking (#1 flagstone) — proof the domain can compete.
- Zero in-body links from posts to service pages. ~20 pool-repair posts never linked the pool renovation page; the ranking equity stopped at the post.
- An indexed "uncategorized" archive; commercial-adjacent posts ("outdoor kitchen cost in Texas") didn't rank because nothing supported them.
New blog + content strategy — the engine, aimed
- Every proven ranking asset preserved verbatim: the flagstone post and all 20 pool-repair posts migrated with slugs intact, so 1:1 redirects carry their equity at cutover. Migration, not rewriting — copy that ranks doesn't get "improved."
- Every post links to its matching service page with a keyword-relevant anchor; a machine-verified cross-link matrix connects city pages ↔ service pages both directions, so no equity dead-ends.
- Forward calendar: city-specific project case studies for the priority cities, each feeding one service page and one city page.
- Clean taxonomy from day one; a 274-URL redirect map is already built so the cutover loses nothing.
5What the New Architecture Is Built to Do
Three mechanisms the old site never had, each already shipped and verified in the build:
| Mechanism | Old site | New site |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial targeting | Services described generically; no page matched "service + city" searches | 857 city×service pages, each with its own title, H1, meta, and city-scoped Service schema |
| Equity routing | Rankings stranded in blog posts | Blog → service → city links, verified by an automated crawl on every build |
| Technical trust | Duplicate pages, junk archives, one giant undifferentiated sitemap | Canonical tags everywhere, one env-switched domain strategy, grouped sitemaps, honest noindex on anything not ready |
6How We'll Know It's Working
The measuring stick is fixed and public inside this engagement: within 90 days of the punch list completing, pbasw.com in the top 10 organic results (or the local pack) for at least 4 of the 6 probe terms above, verified with a geo-located rank tracker — not a casual search. Supporting instrumentation: Search Console on the domain property, lead events on every form and phone tap, and monthly reports keyed to punch-list item IDs so progress is auditable line by line.
Honest caveats, same as the ads plan: everything in the "built to do" column is architecture, not a guarantee — rankings are earned over weeks, and the projections get replaced by measured data at the first monthly report. Some city pages remain deliberately invisible pending business-registration verification; real per-city project photos from the field are still the single biggest content upgrade available and are on the client ask list. The old site keeps serving traffic untouched until the cutover checklist — redirects, content parity, tracking — passes end to end.