Website Build for Boots On The Ground South Wales
Client: Boots on the Ground South Wales Ltd
Industry: Landscaping & Grounds Maintenance
Website: bootsonthegroundsouthwales.com
The Challenge
Boots on the Ground South Wales is a family-run, veteran-owned landscaping business covering Caerphilly, Cardiff, Newport and the Valleys. When Mali took on the role of Director, she inherited a website built in Canva, pieced together with help from ChatGPT along the way, mainly because the business needed a website rather than because it had a plan for one.
If any of this sounds familiar, it's a common starting point. Here's what was holding the site back, and why it matters.
The business traded online as Boots on the Ground Wales, while Companies House had it registered as Boots on the Ground South Wales. That mismatch had already caused a real problem, a finance application for equipment was flagged over the inconsistency. If your business name isn't consistent everywhere, it undermines trust with lenders, suppliers and customers alike, not just search engines.
Mali had around 100 project photos organised into 13 categories, but only a fraction had ever made it onto the website. If your website only shows a slice of what you actually do, potential customers only see a slice of why they should choose you.
And with leads coming almost entirely from Facebook, there was no real SEO foundation to help people find the business when they searched on Google or asked an AI tool like ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews for a landscaper nearby. If you're relying on one channel to bring in work, you're leaving a lot of potential customers unable to find you at all.
Before Website Upgrade
After Website Upgrade
What We Did, And What It Means For You
- Updated the logo to show the correct trading name, so it now matches across the website, van signage, business cards and social media. When your name, colours and fonts look the same everywhere someone encounters your business, it reads as established and trustworthy rather than thrown together.
- Wrote page content, titles and descriptions specifically targeting Caerphilly, Cardiff, Newport and the Valleys, matching the way real customers actually search. This is the core of SEO (search engine optimisation), the work that helps Google, Bing and AI tools understand what your business does, where you operate, and why you should be shown to someone searching for those services. Without it, you can have a beautiful website that almost nobody outside your existing followers ever sees.
- Added LocalBusiness schema. Schema is a bit of invisible code that describes your business, name, address, opening hours, service area, directly to search engines and AI tools, in a format they can read instantly rather than having to interpret from the page text. It's one of the clearest ways to help your business show up correctly in local search results, Google's map listings and AI generated answers.
- Built every page with a proper heading structure, H1 through H6. Your H1 is your main page title, appearing once per page, with H2s, H3s and beyond breaking the content into a logical hierarchy underneath it, much like chapter and section titles in a book. Search engines and AI tools read this structure to work out what a page is about and how it's organised, so a page built this way is far more likely to be understood and ranked correctly than one where everything is just styled to look big and bold with no real structure behind it. It also matters for accessibility, since screen readers rely on headings to help visually impaired visitors navigate a page.
- Split the full 100 image catalogue into a curated Portfolio of before and after case studies, and a separate Gallery for browsing the complete range of work, with every category evenly represented. This means a visitor sees the true breadth of what the business can do, not just whatever happened to be uploaded first.
- Installed Google Analytics and Search Console, so future decisions about the site can be based on what's actually happening rather than guesswork, which pages get visits, what people search to find the site, and where visitors drop off.
The Results
Boots on the Ground South Wales now has a website that properly reflects a growing, family run business, and one that's genuinely built to help new customers find it.
- One consistent identity across the website, vehicles, social media and print
- A full, organised showcase of the breadth of work carried out
- Local SEO foundations in place for Caerphilly, Cardiff, Newport and the Valleys, so the business shows up for the searches that matter
- Structured data (schema) helping search engines and AI tools describe the business accurately
- A proper heading hierarchy helping both people and search engines make sense of every page
- Analytics and Search Console in place so future decisions can be made on fact
- An ongoing Growth Plan in place, including a monthly update process, training videos so Mali and James can update images, blog posts and portfolio projects themselves, and proactive suggestions flagged as they come up
As Mali put it once the site went live:
"I genuinely couldn't be happier with how it has turned out!"
What This Could Mean For Your Business
If your website was built quickly, patched together with a DIY tool, or just hasn't been looked at properly since it went up, the chances are it's quietly missing some of the same groundwork. That doesn't mean starting from scratch. It means having someone go through it properly, get the technical foundations right, and make sure it's actually working to bring you customers rather than just sitting there.
What I Learned
Mali came into this as a new Director with a clear vision but limited time, juggling the admin side of a busy landscaping business while James kept things running on the ground.
What struck me most was how much she trusted the process once we got going, handing over decisions on fonts, colours and layout because she knew what she wanted the end result to feel like, even if she couldn't picture the detail herself.
Sorting through a hundred photos into thirteen even categories and fixing a trading name that had drifted from the official one weren't glamorous jobs, but they were exactly the kind of groundwork that makes a business look as solid online as it actually is offline.
Building the Portfolio using Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) also proved its worth beyond this one project. Rather than building each case study as a one-off page, ACF makes it possible to set up a repeatable template with defined fields for things like the client name, industry, challenge, what was done, and the result. That means future portfolio pieces for this client follow the same structure and layout automatically, saving build time and keeping the presentation consistent without having to rebuild the format from scratch each time.
It was a genuine pleasure helping Mali and James bring some order to a brand that had real substance behind it all along.
Are you looking to upgrade your website to help with SEO, online visibility and to grow your email list? Then get in touch using the button below or email sarah@simpleonlinesolutions.co.uk
