Aesthetic Tree & Hedge Services.

Aesthetic Tree & Hedge Services has been serving Greater Vancouver since 2004. ISA-certified arborists. Over 120 five-star Google reviews. The kind of reputation that should dominate local search.

But when we ran the numbers, the picture was ugly.

Their WordPress site was slow. The design looked like it was built from a theme and never touched again. Service pages used generic slugs that did not match what people actually searched for. Blog posts — 190 of them — were buried under a content structure that made them nearly invisible to Google.

The real problem showed up in Google Search Console. Their number one money keyword, "tree removal vancouver," had 304 impressions per month. They were getting 2 clicks. Position 15.6. That is page two. For a business with two decades of credibility and 120 reviews, page two is unacceptable.

Worse: most of their service pages were not indexed at all. Google literally did not know these pages existed. The old WordPress redirects were broken — pointing to URLs that had been renamed during the migration but never updated. Link equity from years of backlinks was leaking into 404s.

We did not start with design. We started with Google Search Console.

We pulled 28 days of live GSC data: every query, every impression, every click, every position. We cross-referenced with GA4 session data to understand which pages people actually engaged with versus which ones they bounced from.

Then we ran the Compact Keywords audit. This is a framework that checks whether every bottom-of-funnel page has the target keyword in six positions: URL, page title, meta description, H1, first sentence, and first image alt text. The results were grim. Most service pages failed on three or more positions.

Here is what we fixed:

Five WordPress redirect destinations were pointing to the wrong Sanity slugs. Tree removal Vancouver redirected to a URL that did not exist. Stump grinding redirected to a partial slug. Hedge trimming went to a shortened version. Every one of these was a broken chain that bled ranking signals.

We rebuilt 12 service pages with keyword-first titles in Sanity CMS. "Tree Removal Vancouver" instead of "Our Tree Removal Services." "Hedge Trimming Vancouver" instead of "Hedge Services." Simple changes. Massive impact on how Google categorizes these pages.

The schema markup went from zero to enterprise-grade. We implemented LocalBusiness schema with AggregateRating, ServiceSchema on every service page, BreadcrumbSchema on every route, FAQSchema on high-intent pages, and Wikipedia entity linking across 20-plus arboriculture terms. The JSON-LD file alone is 680 lines.

We added trust badges — ISA Certified Arborist, WorkSafeBC, Consumer Choice Award, ThreeBestRated — as actual image assets in both the homepage trust strip and the footer. These are not just visual signals. They reinforce E-E-A-T signals that Google weighs for local service businesses.

Aesthetic Tree charges premium rates. Their crew shows up with professional equipment, follows ISA safety protocols, and delivers results that justify the price. The website needed to communicate that same level of quality.

We replaced the WordPress theme with a GSAP-animated editorial design. Full-height hero sections with sharp photography. Parallax scroll effects on service imagery. Layered compositions with glassmorphism accents. A magazine-style project gallery with horizontal scroll. No card grids.

The homepage features a trust marquee, a service grid with diagonal reveals, a layered about section with overlapping images and a glass quote card, and a horizontal project scroller. Every animation is purposeful — nothing moves just to move.

Typography is deliberate: Cormorant Garamond for headings, DM Sans for body. The color palette is dark forest greens, warm golds, and cream. It reads as premium without trying to look like a tech startup.

Every blog post carries a brand watermark on images. Every page has unique imagery — no reuse across the site. Internal links are woven throughout article body copy, not clustered at the bottom.

The site is live. The redirects are fixed. The schema is deployed. The service pages exist as individual, indexable routes with keyword-optimized metadata.

Here is what GSC showed us at audit time — and what the fixes target:

"Arborist vancouver" — position 5.0, already on page one. Now with a properly optimized service page to hold that ranking.

"Tree trimming vancouver" — position 4.6 with 131 impressions but only 1 click. The title tag now includes a benefit modifier to lift CTR.

"Tree services vancouver" — position 7.1. The homepage now has reinforced content density around this phrase.

The service pages that were previously invisible to Google — tree removal, stump grinding, hedge trimming, tree cutting, arborist reports — are now individually indexed with correct canonical URLs, structured data, and keyword-first metadata.

Old WordPress sitemaps were deleted from GSC. The correct sitemap was submitted. Location pages across 10 Greater Vancouver cities are now discoverable.

The SEO work is not done. It is never done. But the foundation is no longer the bottleneck. The site now has the architecture to rank — which is the part that most rebuilds skip.