Case Study — North Myrtle Beach, SC
Baldwin Builders — North Myrtle Beach General Contractor.
Templated Wix site that ranked nowhere → 56-page custom build climbing Myrtle Beach SERPs every week. Audit score 38 → 89. 21 new commercial-intent keywords ranking in Month 1. This is what a site built to actually rank looks like.
At a glance
The Client
Strong work. Strong reviews. Zero visibility on Google.
Baldwin Builders is a family-owned general contractor on the Grand Strand — custom homes, kitchen and bathroom remodels, additions, storm repair, the works. The reviews were real. The book of work was real. But when a homeowner in North Myrtle Beach searched “general contractor near me” or “custom home builder Conway,” the site was nowhere. A Wix template was eating every lead they could have been getting.
The ask was simple: build a site that matches the quality of the work, and a search footprint that puts them in front of the people already shopping. No fluff. Just rank.
The Challenge
A 38/100 audit score, and a platform that couldn’t be fixed.
The full SEO audit came back at 38/100 with 47 logged
issues. Schema was a bare WebSite tag — no
LocalBusiness, no Service, no FAQ, no Breadcrumb. A sitemap typo was
quietly blocking a real URL from Google. Location pages were 70%
templated with city names swapped, exactly the doorway-page pattern
Google has been deleting from local results all year. Image alt text was
raw camera filenames. No license number on the site. No named team. No
privacy policy. None of it unusual for a small contractor site —
all of it costing rankings.
The platform was the bigger problem. Wix makes schema, redirects, per-page meta, and clean heading hierarchy genuinely hard to control at the scale a contractor site needs — every fix would have cost two or three workarounds. The cheapest path forward was a clean rebuild on a stack that gets out of the way: static HTML on Netlify, no page builder between us and the markup.
The Approach
Six moves, shipped in parallel, every one designed to compound.
01 Site rebuild on a custom static foundation.
The whole site was rebuilt off Wix onto a hand-written HTML/CSS stack
deployed to Netlify. No page builder, no template marketplace. Every page is
a real, hand-edited document with a logical heading hierarchy, semantic
markup, and a comprehensive _redirects file mapping the old Wix
URL graph onto the new one so no link equity was dropped on the floor. The
new homepage ships with a real project hero, a clear service summary, named
owner trust signals, and a structured intake — replacing the templated
quote form that came with the old build.
02 Sixteen original service pages, each one written for a real query.
The service tree was rebuilt from scratch as 16 unique service
pages covering custom home building, residential and commercial
construction, kitchen and bathroom remodels, whole-home renovations, home
additions, structural repair, and storm and water damage repair — split where
it made sense between the Charleston market and the North Myrtle Beach
market. Each page targets a specific search pattern, leads with the question
a homeowner is actually asking, and includes service-level
Service and FAQPage schema so the page can earn
rich-result eligibility on its own merits.
03 Thirteen service-area pages, written for the specific community.
The single biggest leverage move on a service-business site is a real service-area network. The old site had templated city pages that swapped out a city name and called it done. The rebuild replaced them with 13 service-area pages — Charleston, Mount Pleasant, James Island, Charleston County, Conway, Georgetown, Georgetown County, Horry County, Little River, Murrells Inlet, Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, and Pawleys Island — each written for what makes that community different. Coastal building codes, flood zones, hurricane-proofing requirements, the quirks of permitting in Horry County versus Charleston County. The pages aren’t doorway pages — they earn the right to rank.
04 A real schema stack and the technical groundwork to go with it.
Schema went from a single bare WebSite block to a full
structured-data graph. GeneralContractor /
LocalBusiness on every relevant page, with NAP, opening hours,
service area as City and AdministrativeArea
objects, geo coordinates, and a linked AggregateRating backed by
real reviews. Service on every service page,
BreadcrumbList on every interior page, FAQPage
where Q&A made sense, and Article on every blog post with a
named Person author. Image alt text was rewritten end to end,
assets were moved to modern formats, and the broken sitemap entry was fixed
and 301’d.
05 One flagship project page as a content-marketing anchor.
On top of the service and service-area network, the rebuild includes a dedicated long-form project page for the Little Crane Motel build — a real coastal SC commercial project the team delivered. That single page serves three jobs at once: it’s a portfolio piece, it’s a long-tail entry point for “commercial buildout / motel construction coastal SC” queries, and it’s a reference visitors can send to family and partners as proof of work. It’s the template for the rest of the project library as future builds wrap.
Project pages are the most under-used content surface on a contractor site. They’re the single best way to demonstrate competence to someone who’s already on your domain, and they earn long-tail traffic that no service page can rank for — the specific town, the specific scope, the specific build type. Baldwin Builders ships one now, with the structure in place to add the next four or five as they wrap.
06 An 18-post resource library aimed at the homeowner’s first questions.
The rebuild also shipped 18 long-form blog posts
covering the things Grand Strand and Charleston homeowners actually
search before they ever call a contractor — building permits in
Horry County, flood zones and insurance, hurricane-proofing a coastal
home, kitchen vs. bathroom remodel cost trade-offs, what to expect
from the construction process, how to plan a whole-home renovation,
coastal building codes for wind and salt air. Each post is structured
with proper Article schema, internal links to the
relevant service and service-area pages, and a named author byline
so the resource library can earn E-E-A-T signals on its own.
The Results
What changed in the audit, and what we’re still measuring.
The cleanest before/after we can show today is the technical audit on the same domain: 38/100 → 89/100. From “Poor, 47 issues” to “Strong,” with the remaining open items concentrated in off-site signals (review cadence, citations, visible team section) rather than code — meaning the next round of gains is already lined up. The delta strip below shows where each category moved.
GSC and GA4 are still building a clean post-launch window before we publish click and lead totals. Those numbers are tagged pending below rather than guessed at — this case study only ships data we can verify. When the window closes, the pending markers get replaced with real numbers.
Where Baldwin Builders is ranking right now.
Pulled from DataForSEO Labs on 2026-05-12. Charleston commercial queries are Month 2–3 priority and not on this list yet.
| Query | Volume | Position |
|---|---|---|
| baldwin builders (brand) | 260/mo | #2 on Google |
| builders myrtle beach | 170/mo | #11 — top of page 2, ↑ 6 spots in 8 days |
| builders in myrtle beach sc | 170/mo | #13 — top of page 2, ↑ 8 spots in 8 days |
| builders in myrtle beach | 170/mo | #20 — new entry, page 2 |
| myrtle beach contractors | 390/mo | #23 — ↑ 6 spots in 8 days |
| general contractors myrtle beach | 390/mo | #26 — ↑ 6 spots in 8 days |
Commercial-intent keywords climbing 6–9 positions per week. Two 170-volume Myrtle Beach terms are already at the top of page 2 (#11 and #13) and trending toward page 1. The brand keyword sits on page 1 of Google. Month 1 was foundation work — on-page, schema, citations, GBP. Month 2–3 is when this trajectory hits the local pack and starts converting traffic to calls.
We had a website that wasn’t pulling its weight. They rebuilt it from the ground up — service pages, neighborhood pages, the works. Now when somebody searches for a general contractor in North Myrtle Beach, we show up. The calls we get are real project leads. — Baldwin Builders · North Myrtle Beach, SC
Tech & SEO Breakdown
What’s under the hood.
- Stack
- Hand-written HTML and CSS, no framework, no page builder. Vanilla JS where needed.
- Hosting & CDN
- Netlify with edge CDN, automated deploys, and a comprehensive
_redirectsfile mapping the legacy Wix URL graph. - Page count
- 56 pages total (verified from source): 1 homepage, 16 service pages, 13 service-area pages, 1 dedicated project page (Little Crane Motel), 18 long-form blog posts, plus about, gallery, quote, resources, subcontractors, thank-you, and privacy.
- Schema types in production
-
GeneralContractor,LocalBusiness,Service,Article,FAQPage,BreadcrumbList,Organization,Person,AggregateRating,Review,Place,City,AdministrativeArea,OpeningHoursSpecification,GeoCoordinates,PostalAddress,WebSite,WebPage,CollectionPage,ItemList. - Trust stack
- Licensed SC GC #CLG124644, named owner, privacy and terms pages, real testimonials, structured contact intake, full NAP consistency across the site and the Google Business Profile.
- Image pipeline
- Modern formats (WebP / PNG fallback), descriptive alt text on every embedded asset, lazy-loading on below-the-fold images, intrinsic
width&heighton every<img>to prevent layout shift.
Project Gallery
A walk through the rebuilt site.
Six screenshots from the rebuild — homepage, gallery, and contact page, paired before and after.
Want this for your business?
Free SEO audit. Same framework, run on your site.
You get a category-by-category audit score, the prioritized fix list, and a plain-English read on whether your current site can compete or needs a rebuild. No commitment. No sales pitch. Same scoring framework that took Baldwin Builders from 38 to 89.