Case Study | Kitchen and Bathroom Remodeling | Cary, North Carolina
30 Years of Hands-On Craftsmanship. Zero Digital Infrastructure to Compete With.
Eric Reckeweg had what most contractors take a lifetime to earn. What he did not have was a system that let the right people find him.
MDesign Studio built the complete digital foundation for Carolina Installation Services: website, dedicated service pages, GBP optimization, conversion tracking, and a Google Ads campaign, engineered to compete in a market dominated by larger operators with significantly bigger budgets.
What Was Holding a 30-Year Specialist Back?
Eric Reckeweg has been doing this work for 30 years. Not managing crews who do the work. Doing the work himself. He holds a BBB A+ rating, maintains NKBA affiliation, and has vendor partnerships with Kohler, Moen, and Ferguson Home that most contractors in this trade never reach. That is not a resume built overnight. That is three decades of showing up and earning it.
What Eric did not have was a digital system that matched any of it. His website existed but was not built to convert. There was no conversion tracking, no advertising presence, and no infrastructure that told search engines or AI systems what made him different from every other contractor in the Triangle.
The businesses outranking him were not more experienced. They were better set up digitally. The largest competitor in this market runs over 500 active ads with sweepstakes offers, financing deals, and "Free Estimate" language every contractor copies. At $800 per month, Eric was not going to out-spend them. The only path forward was to out-think them.
This is a pattern many business owners recognize. You built real credibility over decades. Online, a competitor with two years of experience and a Google Ads account is beating you. That is not a credibility problem. It is a structural one. And structural problems are fixable.
What Did the Audit Actually Show?
The audit showed a business with genuine, earned authority that was invisible online. The website was not structured for conversion or AI search readability. There was no conversion tracking in place, which meant no visibility into whether any traffic was producing calls or form fills. Competitors with deeper budgets had been running Google Ads for years with no competition from CIS. The GBP categories and individual services were not fully built out, which directly limits local AI citation visibility. NAP was inconsistent across platforms.
The gap was not in the quality of the work. Eric had the BBB A+ rating, the NKBA affiliation, and the Kohler and Moen vendor partnerships. None of it was surfaced in a way that produced recommendations from search engines or AI systems. Thirty years of earned credibility was sitting behind infrastructure that was not built to communicate it. That is what MDesign Studio was brought in to fix.
What Did We Build?
Website
A new website built on Astro, hosted on Cloudflare. Fast load, clean structure, engineered for AI crawler readability and human conversion. Not a template. Built from the ground up around what a homeowner in the Triangle needs to see before they pick up the phone.
Live Site: carolinainstallationservices.com
Service Pages
Two dedicated landing pages: bathroom remodeling in Cary, NC and kitchen remodeling in Cary, NC. Not one generic services page. Each page built to rank for the exact searches homeowners in the Triangle are running and to convert the visitor before they leave. The specificity is the point. A homeowner searching for bathroom remodeling in Cary lands on a page built for that exact search, not a page that mentions it somewhere in the middle.
Content and Copy
Written to answer the questions a homeowner is actually asking. Structured so AI systems can extract, cite, and recommend. The core answer appears within the first 150 words of every key page. The goal was not to sound good. The goal was to be findable and to be trusted once found.
GBP
Fully built out. Primary category: Kitchen remodeler. Three secondary categories: Bathroom remodeler, Tile contractor, and Flooring contractor. Eighteen individual services with separate descriptions. Business hours confirmed. The 680-character GBP description leads with Eric's 30 years of experience and the standard he holds himself to: honest communication and transparent pricing. That is not marketing language. That is what Eric actually does.
Platforms and NAP
Social media profiles aligned across all active platforms. NAP consistent everywhere. All images renamed with SEO-standard filenames. Every signal pointing in the same direction.
Conversion Tracking
Google Tag Manager installed and live on the site. Form submission event and phone call event, both configured and verified. No advertising dollar spends without visibility into what it produces. Before this, Eric had no way of knowing if traffic was turning into leads. Now he does.
Google Ads
Two ad groups: bathroom remodeling and kitchen remodeling. Targeting Cary, Raleigh, and the full Triangle service area with one combined radius. Exact Match and Phrase Match only. $800 per month budget. A campaign briefing built as an HTML document and delivered to Eric and Jose on a live call before a single dollar went live. No surprises.
Why Does "Talk to the Owner Today" Win in This Market?
The largest competitor in this Triangle remodeling market runs over 500 active ads. Sweepstakes. Financing deals. "Free Estimate." "Free Consultation." Every contractor in the space is saying the same thing. When everyone says the same thing, nothing lands.
Eric does not have to out-spend them. He has to say something they cannot say. Eric is on every job personally. Not a project manager. Not a rotating crew. The owner who has been doing this work for 30 years. A homeowner who has been burned before, who hired a contractor and got a crew they had never met, who got surprise costs halfway through, who got silence when something went wrong, reads "Talk to the Owner Today" and stops scrolling. That is not a marketing line. It is a fact. And no competitor running 500 generic ads can claim it. Finding the real differentiator, the one that is true and the one no one else can copy, is what makes a $800 per month campaign competitive against operators spending five times that.
Where Does CIS Stand Right Now?
The website is live. GBP is fully built out. Social profiles are aligned. Conversion tracking is active on both form submissions and phone calls. The Google Ads campaign is built, briefed, and in final Google verification of conversion tracking before launch. The 90-day performance window begins at campaign launch.
The Day 60 target: cost per lead under $200 for jobs averaging $5,000 to $10,000. If that holds, budget scales. This page documents the build as it was delivered. Results will be added as the campaign runs and data comes in. The build is complete. The tracking is in place. What follows is measured.
If This Is Where Your Business Is Right Now...
If you have credibility, experience, and a reputation built over years but you are not showing up where your customers are looking, that is the gap. That is exactly what MDS audits and fixes. The audit is free and tells you exactly where you stand.