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Case Study

A Roof Over Your Family, Built by Ours

How a family-owned Memphis roofing company whose website had gone completely dark got a fast, custom-coded 69-page build, with its real 4.9-star, 500-project record finally in front of the Mid-South neighborhoods it serves.

Client
James Russell Roofing & Restorations
Industry
Roofing & Restoration
Location
Memphis, TN
Scope
New Website + Local SEO
The Build

A Family Story, Told Like One

James Russell Roofing is Jaime and Chris Byram's family company: more than 500 documented roofing and restoration projects across the Mid-South since 2018, every one inspected free and quoted honestly. The new site leads with exactly that. "A roof over your family, built by ours" sits over a real completed project, the verified 4.9-star Google rating is in the hero, and every page from storm damage to insurance claims answers the question a homeowner actually typed.

James Russell Roofing website homepage with the headline A roof over your family, built by ours
jamesrussellroofing.com (Local Howl Build)
The Challenge

A 4.9-Star Company With No Website At All

Seven years of Mid-South homeowners telling their neighbors how the job went had earned James Russell Roofing a 4.9-star Google rating across 138 reviews. Their website never kept up. What lived on the domain was a templated, cookie-cutter build the family never felt represented their work, and by launch week it had stopped representing anything: the old site went completely dark behind a server error, leaving customers who clicked through from Google staring at an error page instead of a roofer.

Underneath the outage sat years of accumulated mess. Multiple redesigns had left behind more than a hundred historical URLs across different structures, flat slugs, nested WordPress trees, dated blog permalinks, and homeowners searching by service and by city, roof repair in Bartlett, storm damage in Collierville, had no dedicated pages to land on. The launch-prep pass became a same-day rescue.

  • The live site went dark behind a server error, visitors reached an error page, not a roofer
  • A templated, cookie-cutter build the family never felt represented their work
  • More than a hundred historical URLs scattered across old slugs, WordPress trees, and dated permalinks
  • Homeowners search by service and by city; a dark site ranks for neither
  • A 4.9-star, 138-review Google reputation with no working website to show it
  • Storm and insurance-claim work, their specialty, with no pages answering those searches
The Solution

Service Pages, City Pages, and a URL Rescue

We rebuilt the site the way the crew works the Mid-South: one page per service, one page per city, every claim verified against the real business, and a redirect for every URL the old site ever had.

A Page for Every Service

Dedicated pages spanning the full range, residential and commercial roofing, storm damage, insurance claims, chimney and flashing repair, gutters, skylights, and full home restoration, each one answering exactly what a Mid-South homeowner types into Google.

Twenty-One City Pages, Two States

Dedicated landing pages for Memphis, Germantown, Bartlett, Collierville, Cordova, and the rest of the West Tennessee map, plus Olive Branch and Southaven across the Mississippi line, the exact suburbs the crew already serves.

A Rescue for Every Old URL

Roughly ninety legacy redirects mapping every era of the old site, flat slugs, nested WordPress trees, dated blog permalinks, to the right new page, with 111 of 119 historical URLs verified landing on live pages at launch.

Verified Proof, Readable by Machines

The real 4.9-star, 138-review Google rating wired into valid, server-rendered RoofingContractor JSON-LD sitewide, plus an AI machine layer, llms.txt, machine-readable page twins, and an AI catalog, so search engines and AI assistants read verified data, not guesses.

The Results

Built to Rank Across the Mid-South

69
Pages Launched
4.9
Star Google Rating
21
City Pages
2018
Family-Owned Since

A complete service-and-city architecture for a family crew with more than 500 documented roofing and restoration projects across the Mid-South.

What Changed

The Assignment vs. The Delivery

The Assignment

  • Replace a site that had gone dark with one the family is proud of
  • Represent the full range: residential, commercial, storm, and insurance work
  • Cover the Mid-South map, including across the Mississippi line
  • Keep years of accumulated old URLs from dying in search
  • Make a 4.9-star, 138-review reputation visible to Google and AI search
  • Capture leads and financing applications on the site itself

The Delivery

  • Fast, custom-coded 69-page Next.js build on Vercel
  • Dedicated pages for every service plus 22 ported blog posts
  • Twenty-one city pages across Tennessee and Mississippi
  • Roughly ninety legacy redirects, historical URLs verified landing live
  • Real 4.9-star, 138-review rating in server-rendered JSON-LD sitewide
  • Working lead forms with email delivery plus an on-site financing application
Built With

Engineered to Rank Like the Roofs Hold Up

A crew that photographs every job and inspects every roof free deserves a site held to the same standard: fast, structured, and built so every search engine and AI assistant can find and recommend it.

Local Howl BuildNext.jsVercelRoofingContractor JSON-LDLocal SEOAI Machine Layer (llms.txt)GA4 + Microsoft ClarityHearth FinancingCore Web Vitals
"Jaime was rapid to respond and did great work at a great price. What more can you ask for? Highly recommended local family operated roofing company."
Andrew Collier, five-star Google review

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