Oakmere Signature Homes
From invisible to indexing in weeks
A full website rebuild after an honest diagnosis revealed why SEO alone was never going to work.
View the live site →The Situation
They came to me for SEO. I told them that wasn't the problem.
Oakmere Signature Homes are a growing independent estate agency doing a lot of things right - active on social media, responding to reviews, maintaining a Google Business Profile. But their website wasn't performing, and Oakmere had come to the conclusion that SEO was what they needed.
After looking under the bonnet, it was clear the issue ran deeper. Their existing agency, to their credit, were already developing a newer product - which perhaps tells its own story about what they thought of the old one. But in the meantime, they were keen to retain the account, and Oakmere were being steered toward an upgrade rather than getting a straight answer about why the current site was the problem.
After my own analysis, it was clear the site had been built on code that was already outdated when it launched, and was technically obsolete by the time Oakmere came to me.
— From the initial diagnosis email to the client
That's not always an easy conversation to have, especially when the client's existing supplier was pushing back. But a patch-up job wouldn't have served them well.
The Diagnosis
What was actually wrong with the old site
When Oakmere shared my findings with their existing agency, the response was telling. Rather than addressing the technical points raised, the agency disputed the analysis and - in the same email - presented a new paid package One off set up fee of £1295 with £95 + vat per month with a minimum 12-month term.
The fact they were actively migrating customers to a new platform says more than any technical argument could. I documented the specific code-level evidence in writing and left Oakmere to draw their own conclusions.
- Code containing Internet Explorer 7 conditional statements - a browser Microsoft stopped supporting in 2016
- A pre-CSS Grid layout system using a 24-column float approach, superseded by Flexbox in the early 2010s
- All CSS written inline within each page - meaning Google had to wade through huge blocks of styling code just to read the content
-
Heavy reliance on
<div>containers rather than semantic HTML5 elements - a pattern largely replaced around 2015 - Mid-2010s style lazy loading implementation - not inherently broken, but indicative of the codebase's age
The Ahrefs audit confirmed it. The site scored 55/100 ("Fair") with 59 errors and 158 warnings - and this was before factoring in the deeper structural issues that tools like Ahrefs can't fully surface.
55 URLs with errors out of 68 crawled
Inline CSS blocking Google indexing
No CRM integration
192 URLs without errors
Remaining issues: client image sizes/formats (work in progress)
Expected to reach 95+ once resolved
The Work
A full rebuild - built to last, not just to launch
Rather than retrofitting SEO onto an unstable foundation, the decision was made to rebuild from scratch in WordPress, with best-practice SEO baked in from the start. The brief was to closely replicate the existing design (to avoid disruption for the client) while completely replacing the underlying code.
Alongside the core build, a few other things needed sorting. Their existing property valuation tool (ValPal) was swapped out for the Zoopla-powered equivalent - better suited to the new setup. Google Search Console and Analytics also needed configuring properly, neither of which had been in place before, meaning Oakmere now have actual visibility into how their site is performing for the first time.
- Full WordPress rebuild replacing legacy HTML codebase
- PropertyHive plugin integration (£299+VAT/yr) for live listings
- 10ninety CRM sync - auto-updates property listings every morning
- ValPal valuation tool replaced with Zoopla equivalent
- Google Search Console and Analytics configured from scratch
- Service pages created from GBP audit - filling gaps in their old site
- Location pages added to target local search intent
- Google Business Profile aligned with the new website
- WhatsApp chat integration via GBP
- Google Ads campaign setup and configuration
- Ongoing maintenance package — plugins, security, backups
One thing worth noting: Oakmere were already doing the right things off-site. The social media, the review responses, the GBP - all of that was in place. The website was simply the weak link. Once that was addressed, the other activity had somewhere solid to land.
Where Things Stand
Still early - but already showing up
The site launched recently and Google is still working through indexing it fully. There's no historical GSC data to compare against either, because the previous build had no Search Console connected at all - so there's no meaningful before/after traffic figure to quote.
What we can say is this: the site is appearing in search results. That alone represents a meaningful change from a build that Google was struggling to read in the first place. The technical foundations are now solid, and as indexing progresses and content matures, those rankings will develop over time.
Want to see the finished result?
View the Oakmere website →Client Feedback
In their words
"We engaged with Ed for our estate agency website. Ed reviewed our current website and found the flaws, gave us recommendations and then implemented this. Ed stuck to his timescales and is great value for money. It is nice to see someone who cares about small businesses and going the extra mile!"
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