- Google impressions
- 4,709
- Clicks
- 50
- Click-through rate
- About 1%
Search Console, the three months before the relaunch.
Chris Allen has been fixing computers in Rogersville for more than 20 years. Virus removal, data recovery, networking, security cameras, the works. Ask around Hawkins County and somebody's uncle has a story about Chris pulling a dead hard drive back from the brink. That is a lot of earned trust for a business to be sitting on.
The website was not carrying any of it. It looked like it was built in the era it was built in, the content repeated itself, and it never quite got around to saying what the business does, where it is, or why you should call. A couple of outside directories had picked up conflicting addresses. One had decided the shop was permanently closed, which would have been news to Chris, who was standing in it.
So we rebuilt it. Start to finish. Here is what the numbers said, what we changed, and what we are watching for next.
The site was not invisible. It was ignored.
Before touching anything, I pulled three months of Google Search Console data on the old site. The usual assumption with a small-town business is that Google simply does not know they exist. That was not the problem here.
The site appeared in Google search results 4,709 times over the quarter and was clicked 50 times. A 1.06% click-through rate with an average position around 48 means the site was ranking around the equivalent of page five on average and not doing much to earn its way off it.
Two more details shaped everything that came after.
First, 40 of the 50 clicks came from phones. Someone whose computer has just died is, by definition, not searching from that computer. The new site had to be built for a thumb and a phone call, not a desktop and a contact form.
Second, the pages doing the most showing up were doing the least converting. Two competing computer-service pages combined for roughly 1,950 impressions and six clicks. The security-camera page, covering one of the shop's strongest services, was seen 412 times and clicked zero times. Google was offering these pages and searchers were declining. That is a clear signal the page and its search snippet were not earning attention, which is about as much diagnosis as you can get without a focus group.
What we built
The old site was WordPress. The new one is static HTML, which for a business like this is the right tool. No WordPress core or plugin stack to maintain, no plugin to get hacked through, and pages that load before the visitor's patience runs out. The green branding stayed, the PVT network-cable logo got a refresh, and the whole thing was reorganized around Chris and the work he actually does rather than around whatever the old theme thought a homepage should be.
Every service got its own page or section with its own title and description, built from what Search Console showed people were looking for:
- Computer and laptop repair, virus removal
- Security cameras, alarms and access control
- Data recovery and backup
- Small-business IT and networking
- Windows 11 upgrades and transfers
- Tech-support scam recovery
- Home Wi-Fi and mesh networks
- Used computers and replacement parts
Three of those pages did not exist before. Windows 11 upgrades, scam recovery and home Wi-Fi were all things people in the area were searching for and things Chris already does. The site just never mentioned them.
Local coverage was rebuilt around the towns the shop serves rather than a vague "the Tri-Cities area." Rogersville, Church Hill, Mount Carmel, Bean Station, Greeneville, Morristown, Kingsport, Johnson City and Bristol each get named, with verified drive times on the service-areas page so nobody in Bristol is surprised by how far Rogersville is.
| Area | Old site | New site |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | WordPress, dated theme, repeated content | Static HTML, CDN-delivered, no core or plugin stack to maintain |
| Mobile | Responsive in the technical sense | Built phone-first with a persistent call button |
| Contact | Buried, plaintext email exposed to scrapers | Two forms with spam protection, click-to-call, Maps directions, email hidden from bots |
| Service pages | Two overlapping repair pages, thin camera page | Seven dedicated service pages, plus a shop inventory section, with FAQs and structured data |
| Local targeting | Generic | Nine named towns, drive times, LocalBusiness schema with map and geo |
| Tracking | None that mattered | GA4 with phone-click, email-click and form-lead events |
| Security | Plugin surface, no email authentication | Content Security Policy, HSTS, SPF and DMARC at reject |
The parts nobody sees
A rebuild that only changes what the visitor sees is a paint job. Most of the hours on this one went into things that will never show up in a screenshot.
Every old URL that had earned any search value now permanently redirects to its new home. Dead blog and tag pages return a proper "gone" signal so Google stops asking about them. The sitemap, robots file and canonical tags were rebuilt from scratch. LocalBusiness structured data tells Google the address, hours, map location and price range in the format it prefers, and every service page carries its own Service schema plus FAQ schema that mirrors the questions visible on the page.
The contact form does not just open the visitor's email app and hope. It relays through a proper mail service with Cloudflare Turnstile, a honeypot and rate limiting, with a mailto fallback if all of that somehow fails. The domain's SPF and DMARC records now tell participating email systems to reject unauthenticated mail claiming to be from pcvirustech.com, which matters more than it sounds like it should for a business whose customers are, by definition, people who have recently been burned by something on the internet.
The site also ships an llms.txt file and markdown versions of its pages for AI agents, because "does ChatGPT know this business exists" is now a real question customers ask without realizing they are asking it.
What happens next
The site is live. That is the part I can report. Calls, leads and rankings are goals right now, not results, and I am not going to dress up a launch as an outcome.
The three-month Search Console export from the old site is the baseline, and I will be re-pulling the same report once the new site has had time to settle. The things I expect to move first are click-through rate on the pages that already had impressions, and phone clicks from mobile, since that is where the demand was already sitting. Average position takes longer and depends on more than the site itself.
The goal for PC Virus Tech was never complicated. Twenty years of doing right by people in Hawkins County should be the easiest thing in the world to find, trust and call. The old site was standing in the way of that. The new one gets out of the way.
Is Google showing your business but customers still aren't clicking?
Bring me your Search Console report. It takes about ten minutes to read, and it will tell you whether your business is invisible, poorly positioned or simply being skipped. Those are different problems with different fixes, and the report says which one you have before anybody spends money on the wrong one.
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