Case study · Built by Lightly Coded
Over $75,000 in quoted work. Twenty-one leads in three months.
TrueFlow HVAC is a sheet-metal, ductwork, and heat-pump-retrofit specialist working across the Halifax Regional Municipality. I built the site end to end. Three months in, it has produced more than $75,000 in quoted and booked work and twenty-one leads — including five in a single week, every one of them from organic search and the site's own form. It gets there by ranking for furnace-conversion searches in Bedford, Dartmouth and Lower Sackville: not the vague head terms an agency would sell, but the specific job in the specific town.
Three months after launch
- $75,000+in quoted and booked work in the first three months
- 21leads recorded in the first three months
- 19clicks in the week of Sep 21–27, up from 1 in July
- 10.1average search position that week, up from 39
Two sources, deliberately kept separate. Search figures are from trueflowhvac.ca's Google Search Console for the calendar week September 21–27, 2026 — its best complete week on impressions, clicks and average position — compared with its first full week, July 13–19. Leads and quoted work are as reported by the owner on October 10, 2026, from the client's own figures: $75,143 in quotes sent and twenty-one leads in the site's first three months. Of the twenty-one, nine are confirmed through the site's own form, two came by phone and email, eight are still being traced and two pre-date source tracking. The $75,143 is quoted and booked work — it stood at $40,000 at the eight-week mark — and it is not closed revenue. I am not claiming any week's clicks produced a given week's leads — that arithmetic doesn't close, and some enquiries reach him by routes Search Console never sees.
The brief
A trade with real demand, and no way to be found in it.
TrueFlow does the work most HVAC companies subcontract out: custom sheet-metal fabrication, ductwork sized and built properly, the duct side of an oil-to-heat-pump conversion. It is skilled, high-ticket work, and the people who need it are searching for it every week across the HRM.
The problem is that none of those searches say "sheet metal." A homeowner converting off oil searches *furnace conversion Bedford*. Someone with a rotting bathroom fan duct searches for the damage, not the trade. If your site is organised around what you call yourself rather than what customers type, you are invisible to all of it.
So the site was never planned as a brochure with a services list. It was planned as a map of the actual searches — every service, in every town TrueFlow serves, with a real page behind each one.
The strategy
Match the page to the search, not to the org chart.
Three decisions did most of the work, and all three were made before a line of code was written.
- 1
Service × town, as separate real pages
Seven services and five service areas — Halifax, Dartmouth, Bedford, Lower Sackville, and Hammonds Plains/Fall River. Each area page names its own towns in body text, because that is the language local search actually matches against. This is why the site ranks for 'furnace conversion bedford' and 'hvac sackville' rather than fighting for a single generic 'HVAC Halifax' term it would lose.
- 2
Guides that answer the question before the sale
Twenty-one guides covering what homeowners actually ask — what a range hood install costs in Halifax, why a bathroom fan must not vent into an attic, whether a heat pump needs new ductwork. These reach people months before they are ready to call, and they are where the site first got traction.
- 3
A contractor-partner track, kept separate
A large share of TrueFlow's work comes from other contractors, not homeowners. Those two audiences want completely different things, so they got their own route rather than being blurred into one homepage that serves neither well.
What got built
Forty-two pages, each with a job.
No filler pages. Every route exists because a real search leads to it or a real customer needs it.
Seven service pages
Ductwork installation, furnace-conversion ductwork, duct sealing, HRV/ERV installation, ventilation, custom sheet-metal fabrication, and commercial sheet metal — each written around the job as the customer describes it.
Five service-area pages
One per community, each naming its towns in text a person and a search engine can both read, and each prioritising the services that community actually buys.
Twenty-one guides
Cost guides, diagnosis guides, and code-adjacent explainers, cross-linked both ways with the services they relate to, so a reader who arrives cold has somewhere sensible to go next.
A for-contractors route
The partner track, with its own framing and its own call to action, so trade enquiries do not have to squeeze through a homeowner funnel.
How it was built
Server-rendered, tested, and honest about its sources.
The same standards I hold my own site to.
Next.js App Router, TypeScript strict
Server-rendered HTML, so every word is in the initial response — for Google, and for the AI answer engines that increasingly sit between a homeowner and a contractor.
Thirty-six tests, including content guardrails
Not just unit tests. Tests that catch content mistakes — a service page linking to itself, two area pages accidentally sharing an identical service priority. Two of them caught real errors mid-edit on the most recent pass.
Structured data on every page type
Service, Article, FAQ, and Breadcrumb nodes with a real local address, so the business is legible to machines as a specific HRM trade rather than a generic company.
Primary sources, read and cited
The cost and code guides cite what was actually opened and read — the ventilation institute's own airflow tables, the Nova Scotia building-code regulations. Where a widely-quoted figure could not be verified for Nova Scotia, the guide says so rather than repeating it. That honesty is the differentiator against the pages currently outranking us.
The results
The number that matters isn't an impression count.
Eight weeks after launch the site had produced more than $40,000 in quoted work; by October 7th the owner's running total had passed $55,000, and by October 10th it stood at $75,143. Five of those leads arrived in a single week — August 23rd to 29th — and the owner confirmed every one of them came through organic search and the site's own form. Four had been out to walk the job within days, and at least three have become jobs. Three months in, the count stands at twenty-one leads. That is the whole point of the exercise, and no impression count carries a fraction of that weight.
The search numbers kept compounding underneath it. In the week of September 21st to 27th the site took 1,120 impressions and 19 clicks at a weighted average position of 10.1 — the edge of page one, up from position 39 in its first full week. Weekly clicks since July: 0, 1, 2, 3, 6, 5, 11, 6, 5, 8, 19. Not a straight line, but the direction is not in doubt.
The queries are why it works. Since launch it has appeared for 241 named searches, 73 of them on page one. 'Furnace conversion lower sackville' alone has drawn 379 impressions, 'furnace conversion bedford' 347, 'furnace conversion dartmouth ns' 323 — every one a homeowner with a specific job in a specific town. The pages that earn the clicks are the practical guides: dryer venting, range-hood venting, HRV replacement cost, the ductwork side of an oil-to-heat-pump conversion. One September lead came from ChatGPT: a homeowner who asked an AI assistant and was sent to the site.
Two things I won't dress up. The $75,143 is quoted and booked work, not money in the bank — quotes don't all close. And I can't draw a clean line from a click to each lead, because the arithmetic doesn't close: some of those people reached him by routes Search Console simply doesn't record. Nine of the twenty-one are confirmed through the site's own form; two came by phone or email, and the rest are still being traced or pre-date source tracking. I'd rather say so than sell you a funnel diagram I can't back.
Complete Mon–Sun calendar weeks from trueflowhvac.ca's Search Console API, July 13 to September 27, 2026. The part-week after launch and the part-week still in progress are omitted rather than drawn as dips they aren't.
Client review
What TrueFlow HVAC said.
“I’ve been really impressed with the work Lightly Coded has done for TrueFlow HVAC. The website looks professional, represents the business extremely well, and most importantly, it’s already generating quality leads.
“It’s exciting to see people finding us online and reaching out for the services we actually want to grow. The attention to detail, content, and overall strategy has made a real difference. I couldn’t be happier with how everything has come together.”
The takeaway
You do not win 'HVAC Halifax'. You win the job in the town.
The instinct with a local trade site is to fight for the biggest term in the city. It is almost always the wrong move: it is the most contested phrase in the market, and it is not even how most people search when they have an actual problem.
What works is the specific job in the specific place, given a real page, written in the customer's words, and linked into the rest of the site properly. It takes more pages and more thought up front. It also starts working within weeks instead of years.
That is the same approach behind every contractor site I build.
Your turn
Want one of these for your trade?
This was a new site from a standing start, built by one person in a few weeks. Tell us what work you want more of and where you work, and you'll get a straight answer on what it would take and what it would cost.