Case Study - Trading Rented Traffic for a Website That Books the Calendar Out

Overview

Springhetti Group builds luxury outdoor spaces across northeast Wisconsin — fiberglass pools, outdoor kitchens, pergolas, fire features, and the hardscape that ties them together. By 2025 they had a marketing engine that produced volume. What it did not produce reliably was the right buyer.

The 2026 redesign changed the question we were optimizing for. Instead of asking how many people we could put on the site, we asked how many of the right people we could keep there — and whether the site itself felt like the work it was selling.

The Challenge: High-Volume Noise

In 2025 Springhetti Group was reaching a large audience. Broad paid social and paid search delivered impressive session counts, and on a traffic chart the year looked healthy.

The engagement data told a different story. An engagement rate of 28.78% means roughly seven in ten visitors arrived and left without meaningfully interacting — no scroll into the work, no gallery browse, no service page, no contact. That is the signature of reach without intent. The ads were doing exactly what broad ads do: putting the brand in front of a lot of people, most of whom were never going to build a pool.

It was also rented. Every month the budget bought a fresh audience, and every month it stopped buying, the audience stopped arriving. Nothing compounded.

The Strategy: Hyper-Local Relevance

The 2026 shift was from renting clicks to building digital equity — visibility the business owns and keeps.

Hyper-local area pages. Someone planning a pool in Appleton does not search for a contractor the way a national audience browses. They search their own city. We built dedicated pages for the communities Springhetti actually serves — Appleton, Green Bay, Neenah, Menasha, Oshkosh, Kaukauna, De Pere, Kimberly, Little Chute, Omro, and Ripon — so that intent has somewhere specific to land.

Service depth over service breadth. Rather than one thin page per offering, we invested in the high-value services that drive the business: fiberglass pools, outdoor kitchens, and the supporting hardscape work. Depth is what earns rankings on competitive terms, and it is also what a serious buyer actually reads before spending six figures on a backyard.

Structured for AI search as well as Google. The same schema, entity clarity, and answer-shaped content that helps a service page rank is what lets ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews name the business when someone asks who builds fiberglass pools near Appleton.

Efficiency over reach. We deliberately pulled back on broad paid spend. That decision is the reason raw session volume fell — and the reason everything else improved.

An Experience That Matches the Work

The other half of the redesign was not a search problem. Springhetti sells a premium, highly visual product, and the previous site described it more than it showed it.

The rebuild leads with the work: full-bleed project photography, a gallery a homeowner can actually browse by city and by feature, and service pages that carry the same weight as the portfolio. These are the real pages, recorded live.

The Results: Quality Over Quantity

Comparing June through August 2025 against the same window in 2026, after the new site went live:

Engagement rate rose from 28.78% to 59.73% — a 107.54% increase. The 2026 visitor was roughly twice as likely to engage with the site as the 2025 visitor. Same business, same services, a fundamentally different audience arriving.

Organic search now drives close to half of all traffic. That share is owned, not rented. It does not stop when a campaign pauses, and it compounds as the area pages and service content age.

The area pages went from zero visibility to producing leads, with Appleton leading local discovery.

The project calendar is booked into 2027.

About the traffic drop

Total sessions fell sharply, and that is the point rather than a caveat.

In 2025 the traffic was largely rented through broad paid social. In 2026 the business transitioned to an owned organic strategy. Removing high-volume, low-intent traffic cleared the noise — the visitors who remain are the ones actively looking to build. A smaller number of the right people, on a site built to convert them, filled the calendar into 2027. A much larger number of the wrong people had not.

It is worth being blunt about the trade: if the only metric on the dashboard is sessions, this looks like a bad year. Engagement, lead quality, and a full schedule all say otherwise.

Local Focus

Expanding the footprint — building organic visibility in the communities Springhetti Group actually serves:

In Their Words

Kellen walks through what the rebuild actually involved — the site, the keyword strategy behind the area pages, and the paid campaign that runs alongside it.

What We Did

Thinking About a Rebuild?

If your site is producing traffic but not booked work, the problem is usually not volume. We start with a free audit that shows exactly where the intent is leaking.