Fifty-nine to 1,380 ranking keywords in a 12-month contract
Anonymised case study: a Dubai fit-out contractor went from 59 to 1,380 ranking keywords in twelve months, with clicks up 643.5% year over year.
Numbers from the client's own reporting
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| ranking keywords, start to end of contract | 59 → 1,380 |
| clicks year over year (223 → 1,660) | +643.5% |
| impressions year over year (8,260 → 193,000) | +2,240.5% |
| clicks, last 8 months | 7.21K |
| impressions, last 8 months | 1.46M |
| average position, all keywords | 54.4 → 20.2 |
| ChatGPT citations, across 30 pages | 122 |
| Period | 12-month contract |
Keyword positions from Ahrefs, 1 January 2025 against 3 September 2025. Click and impression figures from the client's eight-month performance report (Google Search Console).
The situation, goals & challenges
The contractor had been trading since 2011 and had the domain to match, but the search footprint was almost nil: fifty-nine keywords ranking at all, three of them in the top three, and an average position of 54. The portfolio was strong and none of it was reachable.
Google had no picture of what the company did, where it operated, or which projects proved it. Three months of Search Console before the work began showed twenty-seven pages drawing an impression, eleven of them never drawing a click, and the homepage taking four clicks in every five.
SEO strategy for interior fit-out
Fit-out is a considered, referral-heavy purchase with long lead times — so the strategy was never about volume. It was about making one contractor unambiguously legible to Google as the entity that delivers a specific kind of project, in a specific market, to a specific standard.
Lead with the entity, not the keyword
Before a single page was written we made the brand resolvable: one name, one address, one set of credentials, one project record — consistent across site, listings and trade directories.
Cluster by scope, not by adjective
Commercial, residential, joinery, MEP coordination and handover each became a defined scope with deliverables, not a paragraph of "bespoke, luxury, turnkey".
Publish the project record
Completed builds carried budgets, programme lengths and material specifications. That is the information gain competitors would not publish — and what AI assistants now cite.
Make it machine-readable
Organisation, Service and Project schema plus entity linking tied every page back to the contractor, which is why thirty of its pages became ChatGPT sources.
What the engagement actually contained
The programme ran as a seventeen-step sequence tracked to completion in a shared workbook. The volumes underneath it are the part that is hard to fake.
- 285 competitor keyword positions analysed before anything was written
- 124 client keywords expanded into 266 topical clusters across nine categories
- 34 service URLs proposed, from interior design down to kitchen and bathroom
- Main menu and footer restructured around those categories
- 174 keywords put under rank tracking
- 281 internal links mapped by source, target and anchor text
- 208 content items taken through approval before publishing
Numbers that speak louder than claims
All figures from the client's own Search Console, rank trackers and delivery workbooks, recorded on the dates shown.
Page-one positions for high-value queries
Keyword rankings, 1 Jan 2025 vs 3 Sep 2025
| Position band | 1 Jan 2025 | 3 Sep 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| All ranking keywords | 59 | 1,380 |
| Positions 1–3 | 3 | 35 |
| Positions 4–10 | 7 | 139 |
| Positions 11–20 | 2 | 173 |
| Positions 21–50 | 20 | 623 |
Where it started: every page with any visibility
| Page | Clicks | Impressions | Avg. position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homepage | 566 | 25,574 | 55.8 |
| Experience detail page | 110 | 1,717 | 22.5 |
| Contact us | 15 | 4,714 | 7.8 |
| Services index | 2 | 3,528 | 3.1 |
| Experiences index | 3 | 3,349 | 3.9 |
| Residential services | 0 | 1,466 | 4.0 |
| Joinery services | 0 | 654 | 65.2 |
| All 27 pages | 717 | 45,865 | — |
Google Search Console, 12 October to 11 January, before the programme started.
Visibility inside AI search
| Surface | Citations | Pages cited |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 122 | 30 |
| Gemini | 11 | — |
| AI surfaces citing the site | 5 | — |
The same entity work that fixed Google visibility made the brand quotable to language models — a channel that did not exist in the original brief.
What we delivered
- Ranking keywords from 59 to 1,380, with 35 in the top three and 139 in positions 4–10
- Clicks up 643.5% and impressions up 2,240.5% year over year in matched 28-day windows
- Average position across all keywords from 54.4 to 20.2
- Four category terms held as an AI Overview rather than a numbered position
- 122 ChatGPT citations across thirty pages, and citations on five AI surfaces in total
How it unfolded
A note on this engagement
Our engagement with this client has concluded, and search activity for the account has since been managed by the client's in-house team. The figures presented here cover the period of our involvement and the reporting window immediately following it. Any subsequent movement in the site's visibility sits outside the scope of our work and reflects a materially different competitive environment — sustained investment by competitors in the fit-out category, together with successive Google algorithm updates as search behaviour has shifted toward conversational and AI-generated answers. We publish this case study on the basis of the results achieved during the engagement, and are happy to discuss the full reporting history on request.
The verdict: strategic SEO transforms businesses
A portfolio business that used to rely on referrals now gets found — on Google, and inside the AI assistants its clients ask first. Same projects, same team; the difference is that search engines finally understand them.
Kanwal Shahzad is a founder, strategist and AI enthusiast with 20 years of experience spanning finance, digital marketing and AI. She started her journey at EY, then spent a decade building Digidot into one of the region's pioneering AI-powered agencies. Today she leads two companies, including aisfy.ai at DIFC AI Campus — governance-first AI infrastructure designed to embed compliance, ethics and resilience at the core of business growth.
Services used: Web Development · SEO Dubai · AEO & GEO · Sector: Interiors & fit-out · All case studies
