Digital Transformation
Industry: Construction / Real Estate
55/100
Pre-engagement Lighthouse performance score
In short
Arcetis delivered a full brand, website, and digital growth engagement for a custom home building and knockdown-rebuild construction company in Sydney, Australia, covering brand identity, a website rebuild, Google Ads, Meta Ads, and SEO. The engagement started from a documented technical baseline: a pre-project Google Lighthouse audit of the client's existing website scored 55/100 for Performance, 64/100 for Accessibility, 58/100 for Best Practices, and 92/100 for SEO. The founder has confirmed all five workstreams as actually scoped and delivered.
This client is a custom home building and knockdown-rebuild construction company operating in Sydney, Australia, competing in a category where prospective clients commit substantial budgets to a builder largely on the strength of trust, portfolio, and local reputation. Before engaging Arcetis, the company's web presence carried the kind of technical debt common to small-to-mid construction businesses: a site with measurable performance, accessibility, and code-quality shortfalls. Arcetis was brought in to deliver a coordinated overhaul across five disciplines: brand identity, website design and development, Google Ads, Meta Ads, and SEO. The engagement has been confirmed by the company's founder as an actually-delivered project, with all five workstreams — branding, website, Google Ads, Meta Ads, and SEO — scoped and completed.
The business competes in Sydney's custom home building and knockdown-rebuild market — a category generally defined by long sales cycles and high-value contracts, where homeowners are committing to one of the largest financial decisions they will make and tend to evaluate builders on trust signals, portfolio quality, and how professional a company appears before they ever pick up the phone or submit an enquiry. In categories like this, a company's website and digital presence typically function as much as a credibility instrument as a marketing channel. Before the engagement began, Arcetis ran a Google Lighthouse audit of the client's existing website to establish an objective, documented starting point rather than relying on a subjective read of what needed fixing. Across Lighthouse's four categories, the site scored unevenly. SEO measured 92/100, indicating the existing site already had reasonably solid on-page fundamentals in place. The other three categories told a different story. Performance came in at 55/100 — a score in that range is typically associated with slow page loads, unoptimized image assets, and render-blocking resources, all of which tend to increase bounce rates on mobile connections and work against conversion for a business whose enquiries often start as a mobile search. Accessibility scored 64/100, below the range Lighthouse treats as solid, meaning some visitors — including those using screen readers, keyboard navigation, or with low vision — likely encountered friction using the site. Best Practices sat at 58/100, generally an indicator of underlying code-quality and hygiene issues such as deprecated APIs, console errors, or inconsistent security configuration. Beyond the technical baseline, the engagement's scope also covered building out Google Ads and Meta Ads as structured, local paid acquisition channels — the kind of high-intent campaigns a knockdown-rebuild business typically depends on for lead flow beyond referral and word of mouth. Taken together, an underperforming website across three of four Lighthouse categories, paired with a paid acquisition program built as part of this engagement, meant the business's online presence understated the quality of the work it was actually capable of delivering.
Arcetis served as the client's end-to-end digital partner across brand, website, and growth marketing, engaged directly by the company's founder. Arcetis led the pre-engagement technical audit of the existing website, using Google Lighthouse to document baseline Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO scores as the reference point for everything that followed. Arcetis designed the company's brand identity, built and launched a new website to replace the audited site, and set up and managed both a Google Ads account and a Meta Ads program as the business's paid acquisition channels. Arcetis also scoped and delivered an SEO program intended to carry forward the existing site's comparatively strong SEO baseline. Across all five disciplines, Arcetis acted as the sole outside vendor responsible for scoping, building, and delivering the work.
Arcetis developed a brand identity for the business to use across its website, ad creative, and marketing collateral. For a custom home builder competing on trust and portfolio quality, a considered brand identity functions as part of how the business signals credibility to homeowners evaluating a large, one-time purchase. The brand identity work was scoped as the foundation the website and ad campaigns would be built on, so the visual language used in Google and Meta ad creative matched what a prospective client would see once they landed on the site.
Arcetis designed and built a new website to replace the client's existing site, whose pre-engagement Lighthouse audit had scored 55/100 for Performance, 64/100 for Accessibility, and 58/100 for Best Practices. The rebuild was scoped to address the technical shortfalls the audit surfaced — page speed, accessible markup, and code quality — while preserving the strength already present in the site's 92/100 SEO score. The new site was built to serve as the landing destination for the Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns Arcetis also managed.
Arcetis built and managed a Google Ads account for the business, structured around its two core service lines — custom home building and knockdown-rebuild construction — with campaigns aimed at capturing local search demand in the Sydney market. Account setup followed standard paid-search practice for a considered-purchase, local-service category: geographically targeted campaigns, service-specific ad groups, and conversion tracking tied to enquiry actions on the new website, so spend could be evaluated against leads rather than clicks alone.
Arcetis set up and managed a Meta Ads program spanning Facebook and Instagram, complementing the intent-driven Google Ads campaigns with awareness and consideration-stage advertising suited to a visual, portfolio-driven category like custom home building. Meta campaigns were built around the brand identity and creative assets developed as part of the engagement, using project imagery to reach homeowners earlier in the decision process than search typically captures. A Meta Ads program built for a considered-purchase category like this one typically also carries retargeting audiences aimed at site visitors who have not yet enquired.
Arcetis scoped and delivered an SEO program building on the existing site's 92/100 Lighthouse SEO score, one of the stronger elements of the pre-engagement audit. The work focused on carrying that on-page SEO strength through the website rebuild rather than losing it during the technical overhaul, alongside technical SEO work connected to the same page-speed and code-quality issues identified in the Performance and Best Practices audit results, since these Lighthouse categories share several underlying technical dependencies.
The engagement started with the Lighthouse audit itself, which Arcetis used as a working punch list rather than a report to file away: each of the four category scores maps to a distinct set of engineering and content issues, and the rebuild was scoped to address root causes instead of layering new pages onto an underperforming foundation. A Performance score of 55/100 typically traces back to unoptimized image assets, unminified or render-blocking scripts, and a lack of caching or modern image formats. The standard remediation path for a score in that range is to rebuild on a modern, mobile-first stack with optimized image delivery, lazy loading, and a minimized JavaScript payload, since a construction business's leads frequently start as a mobile search. A Best Practices score of 58/100 is commonly tied to issues like inconsistent HTTPS enforcement, deprecated browser APIs, or console errors thrown by outdated third-party scripts — fixes that come more cleanly from a rebuild than from patching an existing codebase. Accessibility at 64/100 typically indicates missing alt attributes, insufficient color contrast, and non-semantic markup; addressing it during a rebuild rather than retrofitting it afterward meant building accessible markup, adequate contrast ratios, and proper heading structure in from the start, which is the standard, lower-cost way to raise an accessibility score compared with auditing and patching a live site after launch. Because the existing site's SEO score was already strong at 92/100, the rebuild was scoped to preserve that equity — carrying forward URL structure, metadata, and indexed content patterns that were already working, rather than risking a full re-platform that could cost the business its existing organic visibility during the transition. That is standard practice on any rebuild of a site with an above-average existing SEO score: audit what is already ranking, map old URLs to new ones, and treat technical SEO as a constraint on the rebuild rather than an afterthought. On the paid media side, Arcetis followed standard account-structuring practice for a local, considered-purchase construction business. A Google Ads account for a business like this is typically organized by service line and geography — separate campaigns or ad groups for custom home building versus knockdown-rebuild work, targeted to the Sydney metro area, with conversion tracking wired to on-site enquiry actions so spend can be evaluated against leads rather than clicks alone. Meta Ads campaigns for the same category are typically built to run earlier in the funnel, using portfolio and project imagery to build awareness among homeowners who have not yet started actively searching, alongside retargeting audiences built from website visitors — so the two channels cover different stages of a long, considered sales cycle rather than duplicating the same intent. The brand identity work was sequenced ahead of the website build and ad creative so the visual language stayed consistent from the first ad impression through to the enquiry form on the site — a standard sequencing decision on any engagement bundling brand, website, and paid media together, since building ad creative or a website ahead of a finished brand identity typically means redoing assets once that identity is locked in.
Arcetis anchored the engagement in a documented, tool-based diagnostic rather than a subjective site review: a Google Lighthouse audit of the existing site returned Performance 55/100, Accessibility 64/100, Best Practices 58/100, and SEO 92/100. Using an objective, repeatable audit as the starting reference point meant rebuild priorities were driven by measured deficiencies rather than opinion, giving the client a concrete before-picture of the site's technical health across all four Lighthouse categories.
With the existing site already scoring 92/100 on Lighthouse's SEO category, the rebuild was approached as an SEO-preserving migration rather than a clean-slate relaunch, treating existing on-page SEO strength as an asset to carry forward. This is a standard but easily-skipped discipline on website rebuilds: businesses that re-platform without mapping and preserving what's already ranking often lose organic visibility during the transition, even when the new site is otherwise an improvement.
Google Ads and Meta Ads were built as complementary rather than duplicate channels: Google Ads targeting active, high-intent local search demand around custom home building and knockdown-rebuild services, and Meta Ads running earlier-funnel, portfolio-driven creative to reach homeowners before they start searching. Structuring the two channels around different stages of a long, considered purchase cycle is standard practice for construction and other high-value local-service categories, where search intent alone misses buyers who have not started actively looking.
The pre-engagement Accessibility (64/100) and Best Practices (58/100) scores pointed to underlying markup and code-quality issues rather than surface-level content problems. Rebuilding the site instead of patching it is the standard way to address issues like these at a structural level — building semantic, accessible markup and clean, modern code in from the start, rather than retrofitting fixes onto an existing codebase after launch — and is generally the lower-effort path to resolving Lighthouse Accessibility and Best Practices findings.
Pre-engagement Lighthouse performance score
Workstreams delivered: brand, website, Google Ads, Meta Ads, SEO
Technology used
Key learnings
This engagement illustrates what a coordinated brand-to-growth project looks like when it is scoped against an objective technical baseline rather than a subjective pitch. Starting with a Google Lighthouse audit, rather than a general site critique, gave both Arcetis and the client a shared, measurable starting point across four dimensions of site quality — the kind of diagnostic that holds up regardless of who reads it later. It is also worth being direct about what this case study can and cannot claim. No post-engagement Lighthouse re-scan, traffic figures, or lead numbers were captured or documented for this project, so this write-up describes what was built and delivered rather than a measured lift. That is a deliberate choice: Arcetis does not publish numbers it cannot verify, even for a client the founder has confirmed as a real, delivered engagement. For a category like custom home building and knockdown-rebuild construction, where the sales cycle is long and a single contract can be substantial, bundling brand, website, and two paid channels under one vendor has a structural advantage: the visual identity, the site each ad points to, and the campaigns driving traffic to it are built to work as one system rather than assembled from separate vendors' independent decisions. Whether that structural advantage shows up in lead volume or a stronger Lighthouse score is exactly the kind of thing a follow-up audit — ideally a second Lighthouse scan alongside campaign and enquiry data — would be needed to confirm, and that honesty about what remains unmeasured is itself part of how this engagement should be read.
Timelines vary by scope, and no project duration is documented for this engagement. What is documented is the breadth of it: Arcetis scoped and delivered five distinct disciplines — brand identity, website design and development, Google Ads, Meta Ads, and SEO — as one coordinated engagement for a Sydney construction client, confirmed by the founder as fully delivered.
For this client, delivery included a new brand identity, a rebuilt website, a structured Google Ads account targeting the business's core service lines, a Meta Ads program across Facebook and Instagram, and an SEO program built on the existing site's on-page SEO strength. That mix reflects what a business selling a high-value, considered purchase typically needs: credibility-building brand and website work paired with both intent-driven (Google) and awareness-driven (Meta) paid channels.
A Lighthouse audit gives an objective, repeatable score across Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO instead of relying on a subjective read of what's wrong with a site. In this case, the audit showed a site with strong existing SEO (92/100) but weak Performance (55/100), Accessibility (64/100), and Best Practices (58/100) — a profile that told Arcetis to preserve the site's SEO equity during the rebuild while fixing the technical debt behind the other three scores.
It can, when the two channels are structured to do different jobs rather than duplicate each other. Google Ads is generally used to capture homeowners already searching for a custom home builder or knockdown-rebuild service, while Meta Ads reaches people earlier, before they've started actively searching, using portfolio and project imagery. For this client, both channels were set up alongside the website rebuild and SEO work so the same brand identity and messaging carried through every touchpoint.