Case Study · Airtight Systems · Windows & Doors · Ireland
From decades of trade reputation to 4× inbound quote requests — Airtight Systems.
Airtight Systems had built one of the most respected windows, doors, and air-tightness installation businesses in the country — every job won through referral. Online they barely existed. We rebuilt the website, built service-county landing pages for every product line, and turned a phone-and-referrals business into one whose biggest source of qualified quotes is now Google.
Where they started
Airtight had spent two decades quietly becoming the contractor architects called when air-tightness on a passive build couldn't fail. The portfolio was real — Passivhaus projects, schools, retrofits across Leinster and Munster. The reputation travelled by word of mouth between site managers and quantity surveyors who'd worked with them once and never used anyone else.
The website didn't tell that story. It listed products, not projects. It targeted "windows" generically. It didn't mention air-tightness testing, BER ratings, A-rated glazing, or any of the technical language buyers actually search. And it ranked for nothing — at the precise moment a generation of homeowners moved their research entirely to Google before they ever called a contractor.
The actual problem
This wasn't a "we're losing rankings" story. This was a "we never owned them" story:
- One generic services page covering windows, doors, and air-tightness — three completely different buyer journeys collapsed into one URL Google couldn't classify.
- Zero county-level pages, despite installing across Dublin, Wicklow, Kildare, Meath, Cork, Kilkenny, and Tipperary. Every "windows Wicklow" search went to a competitor.
- No content addressing technical buyer queries — "BER A-rating windows", "passive house glazing", "air-tightness testing cost", "triple glazing vs double". The architects and self-builders ran those searches every week.
- Project portfolio buried behind PDFs — beautiful work, completely uncrawlable.
- Google Business Profile under-categorised — "Window Installation Service" only, missing Door Installation, Glazier, and the air-tightness-related categories.
What we did
The order mattered. A 20-year reputation business doesn't need brand awareness — it needs Google to understand what it does and where. We sequenced the work so the technical pages started ranking before the broader category terms even moved.
01 · Weeks 1–2Audit + technical SEO foundation
Full site audit: crawl, canonicals, schema, Core Web Vitals, mobile rendering. Mapped every service against the queries Irish architects, builders, and self-builders actually run. Output: a one-page priority plan — fix the foundations first, build the pages second.
02 · Weeks 2–6Service-line page architecture
Replaced one services page with separate, deep landing pages for windows, doors, and air-tightness — each with FAQs, indicative price ranges, glazing-spec breakdowns, and project examples. Built Product / Service schema on every page. Each service page now had its own ranking trajectory instead of fighting the others for attention.
03 · Weeks 4–12Service-county landing pages
Built 28 service-county pages — "windows Dublin", "doors Wicklow", "air-tightness testing Cork", and so on across the seven counties they actually serve. Local context per county (planning culture, build types, common queries), shared technical credentials, and county-specific project galleries. Internal linking discipline so authority flowed cleanly between hub pages and the long tail.
04 · Weeks 6–10GBP rebuild + technical content
Rebuilt the Google Business Profile with every relevant category, every service, structured product photos, and weekly project posts. Published the technical content the buyer audience was searching for: BER A-rating glazing comparisons, passive-house window selection guides, air-tightness testing explainers. The kind of content that gets bookmarked by self-builders and shared by architects.
05 · Months 3+Project case-study engine
Turned the existing project portfolio into a structured case-study system — one URL per major build, photos with descriptive alt text and ImageObject schema, project briefs with technical specifications. The case studies started ranking for "passive house windows Dublin" and "Passivhaus air-tightness Ireland" — exactly the queries that bring qualified specification-stage inbound.
The outcome
The lift didn't come from tricks. It came from making 20 years of legitimate authority finally visible to Google in the language buyers were searching.
- +312% organic traffic over nine months — measured against the 12 months prior.
- 4× the volume of inbound quote requests, with quote values trending higher because the technical pages pre-qualified the buyer.
- 28 of 28 service-county landing pages ranking top-3 for their primary commercial query within six months.
- Top-3 nationally for "BER A-rated windows Ireland", "passive house glazing Ireland", and "air-tightness testing Ireland".
- Featured in Google's "People also ask" panels for triple-glazing comparison queries that send weekly inbound from architects.
- 67% of new clients now arrive through organic search — up from "almost none, mostly referrals" twelve months earlier.
What changed for them
Airtight didn't change what they did. They didn't expand product lines, hire a sales team, or buy ads. They simply made it possible for the buyers already searching to find them. Inbound quote volume now lets them choose specification-stage projects over reactive ones, and the marketing channel that used to be "we don't really do that" has become the most reliable pipeline in the business.
This is what SEO looks like when it's applied to a business that already deserves to win — none of it is magic, all of it is overdue.
Want similar results in your Irish trade business?
If you've got real reputation but Google has no idea you exist — that's the same gap Airtight had. free AI Search Snapshot. We'll show you exactly which queries you should already own and what it would take to claim them.
Get my free snapshot →