Richardson Tree Surgery

Richardson Tree Surgery came to us in 2020 via a referral. Suzie had been left with a poorly performing website by a previous provider, visually dated, badly structured, and largely invisible to search engines. The brief was to fix all of that: a modernised brand, a new website built properly from the ground up, and an SEO strategy that could compete against larger, more established businesses in local search.

RTS’s typical client is an older repeat customer, so the site needed to feel trustworthy and straightforward, with a logical structure that didn’t require effort to navigate. But it also needed to work hard for new clients finding the business for the first time. The user journey was designed with both audiences in mind, with SEO consideration built into the structure from the start, supported by a careful approach to reviews, local listings, and site architecture. That meant competing against larger sites and backlink farms not by matching their tactics, but by doing things properly: clean optimisation, genuine reviews, and steady iteration over time.

The impact was significant. Search acquisitions grew by over 3x and sessions by around 3.3x over the course of the engagement. The business became so busy the website had to carry notices saying they were fully booked months in advance, sometimes several months ahead. We continued working with Richardson for a number of years, and the sustained growth the site delivered contributed to both Suzie and her partner being able to retire earlier than they had planned. It’s one of the more satisfying outcomes from my time at Hay & Rice — a small business that went from invisible online to genuinely thriving, through nothing more than doing the work properly.

The engagement ran as an ongoing relationship throughout, with regular reporting, iterative content updates, and performance reviews keeping the site moving in the right direction.