Richard and the crew from Pinecone Agency were incredibly accommodating in our very particular build requirements.Incredibly accommodating with our build.
— Tim Zafir

Building a contractor’s site that wins local searches suburb by suburb

Case study

Donegal Services

Donegal Services has run demolition, excavation and hauling across Chicagoland since 2005. Its website said none of that with any force: navigation was confusing, services and locations were tangled together, and updating anything needed a developer. We rebuilt it in Webflow around a simple grid of services, service areas and projects, all interlinked, all manageable by the team, and structured for both traditional search and AI assistants.

  • The Donegal Services homepage shown on a desktop browser and a phone, headed "Chicago’s Trusted Demolition & Excavation Contractor" over site machinery photography, with a Get a Fast Estimate action.
  • The projects index, a grid of real job write-ups including demolition and storm sewer work with location names in the titles.
  • The DuPage County service-area page, headed "Trusted Site Services for DuPage County Since 2005" with client reviews beneath.

Overview

Client
Donegal Services
Industry
Demolition and excavation
Location
Lemont, Illinois
Services
Part of

The challenge

Donegal Services came to us in October 2025 with a website working against the business. Twenty years of demolition, excavation and hauling work read as generic, because the site that presented it was dated, confusing to move through, and thin on proof.

The structural problem mattered most. A contractor like this is hired locally: someone in Naperville searches for a demolition contractor in Naperville, not in general. The old site had no way to answer that search, no clear pages for each service, and no project evidence to back its claims.

Updating it was also a developer job. Adding a completed project or a new service area meant waiting on someone technical, so the site fell further behind the business with every job finished.

Our approach

  1. Strategy

    The architecture is the strategy: services, service areas and projects as three interlinked CMS collections, each answering a different search.

    • Seven service pages, from demolition and excavation to dumpsters and heavy haul
    • Seventeen service-area pages covering the counties and suburbs the crews actually work
    • Real project write-ups linked from the services and suburbs they happened in

  2. Design

    Built to look like the work: heavy, precise and safe.

    • Real job photography rather than stock machinery
    • Estimate requests treated as the primary action on every page
    • Mobile-first, for the person standing on a site that needs clearing

  3. Development

    A Webflow build the team can run without us.

    • CMS collections for services, projects, locations and testimonials
    • Client-first class naming, so future developers inherit a maintainable build
    • A recorded training walkthrough at handover

Technical deep-dive

  • Local SEO as page architecture

    Each suburb page is a real page about real work there, not a template with the town name swapped.

    • Seventeen service-area pages, each linking the services and projects relevant to it
    • Structured data on every layer: local business, service catalogue, and per-area pages
    • Five-star review markup carried from the business’s own Google reviews
  • Structured for AI answers as well as search

    Buyers increasingly ask an assistant instead of a search box, so the site speaks that format too.

    • A plain-text llms.txt describes the business directly to AI assistants
    • It states the facts and explicitly tells models not to invent credentials
    • Schema markup gives the same answers to traditional search engines
  • Projects as living proof

    Completed jobs are the strongest sales content a contractor has, so publishing one is now a form, not a project.

    • Twenty-four project write-ups at launch, from home demolitions to storm sewer works
    • Each project links back to its service and its suburb, feeding the local pages
    • The team adds new projects through the CMS without touching layout
  • One estimate path everywhere

    Every page ends the same way: a fast estimate, scoped by project type.

    • The estimate form asks the project type up front, so enquiries arrive pre-sorted
    • Phone and email routes stated plainly for people who would rather call

Results and impact

The counts below are structural, taken from the live sitemap in September 2026. No traffic or lead figures are published for this project.

  • 17

    Service-area pages

    Each county and suburb the crews serve has its own page, linking local projects and services, so nearby searches land somewhere specific.

  • 24

    Project write-ups

    Real jobs with locations in the titles, published by the team through the CMS as work completes.

The site now matches how this business is actually hired. A search from a suburb the crews serve lands on a page about that suburb, with the right services and nearby projects one click away, and an estimate form at the bottom of all of it.

Just as importantly, the team owns the content. New projects and new service areas are CMS entries, so the site grows with the job list instead of trailing it.

Key takeaway

For a local contractor, the site architecture is the SEO. Donegal Services did not need clever content. It needed a page for every service, a page for every suburb, and proof wired between them, in a CMS the team can keep feeding. Doing that with structured data for search engines and a plain-text version for AI assistants covers how people find a contractor now, and how they will next year.

Let’s build something that works for your business

High-performing websites, AI-powered software, and automations — built to scale and evolve with your business.

Book a discovery call

30-minute call · no obligation

More work