Project Overview
Screed is a designer lighting and interior retailer. Techesprit was brought on in April 2025 to rebuild their WordPress and WooCommerce site from the ground up and manage their SEO strategy as one connected engagement. Within a few months of the new site going live, Screed saw an 82.9% increase in monthly users and a 60% increase in organic search traffic, alongside a completely redesigned, faster, and easier-to-manage website.
The Challenge
A site that didn’t match the product and had no active SEO strategy
Screed sells designer lighting and interior pieces where photography and presentation carry the sale. Their existing site didn’t reflect that standard, and organic search had never been actively managed. A few clear goals were going in: rebuild the site from scratch on clean, modern code, improve product presentation to match the quality of what they sell, establish an SEO strategy from the ground up, and avoid the common rebuild risk of losing existing search visibility during the transition.
The Development Work
A full WordPress and WooCommerce rebuild, coded from scratch
This wasn’t a template adapted to fit. We built Screed’s site from the ground up on WordPress and WooCommerce, with the codebase written clean and efficient rather than assembled from stacked plugins. The rebuild covered:
- Custom design built around Screed’s product photography and brand, not a pre-built theme.
- WooCommerce structured around their full product catalog, with clear category and navigation architecture.
- Clean, maintainable code, making future updates and content changes easier for their team to manage.
- Mobile-responsive design across every page, not just the homepage.
- Backend database structure built to handle the catalog size without slowing the site down.
- Ongoing technical support throughout the build, with issues resolved promptly rather than queued for a later sprint.
The result is a site that loads fast, is easy for Screed’s team to update themselves, and presents their products the way high-end lighting and interior pieces need to be presented.
The SEO Work
Built in alongside development, not added after launch
Rather than launching the new site and addressing SEO afterward, technical and on-page SEO were implemented as part of the same engagement. This included on-page optimization across product and category pages, technical SEO to support crawlability and indexing on the new site structure, and ongoing performance tracking through Search Console and Semrush.
The Results
Significant growth across traffic, users, and search visibility
Comparing August through October 2025 performance against the July 2025 baseline:
Search Console and analytics, August to October 2025 vs July baseline
Monthly users
+82.9%
New users
+93.8%
Page views
+63.2%
Organic search traffic
+60.0%
Organic impressions
+50.7%
Organic clicks
+20.5%
Semrush domain data, July to October 2025
Organic traffic
+27.3%
6,600 to 8,400
Organic keywords
+26.7%
1,500 to 1,900
Traffic share
21% to 32%
AI search visibility, July vs October 2025
AI visibility score
0 to 14
AI mentions
0 to 7
Cited pages
0 to 355
Cited pages by platform in October: 44 ChatGPT, 20 Google AI Overview, 314 Google AI Mode
Search Console Stats Of August
Search Console Stats Of October
Semrush Stats‘s domain data for screed.com.sg shows the same growth from a third-party perspective, tracking organic traffic, ranking keywords, and overall traffic share for the domain between July and October 2025.
Worth noting honestly:
Authority Score, referring domains, and total backlinks held flat across this period (16, 391, and 2,100 respectively in both months). Link building wasn’t included in this engagement’s scope; it wasn’t part of the client’s budget for this phase, so the traffic and keyword growth above came entirely from technical and on-page SEO work, without any backlink acquisition behind it. That makes the organic traffic and keyword gains more notable, not less, since they were achieved on-site alone. Link building remains a clear opportunity for continued growth if it’s added in a future phase.
AI Search Visibility
From zero presence to active citation in AI-generated answers
In July 2025, Screed had no measurable presence in AI search tools, zero visibility, zero mentions, and zero cited pages across ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode, and Gemini. By October 2025, that changed substantially:
- AI Visibility score: 0 to 14
- Brand mentions across AI platforms: 0 to 7
- Total cited pages: 0 to 355, broken down as 44 citations in ChatGPT, 20 in Google AI Overview, and 314 in Google AI Mode
This is a meaningfully different kind of result than traditional organic ranking growth. As more search behavior shifts toward AI-generated answers, showing up as a cited source inside those answers, not just a blue link on a results page, is becoming its own measure of search visibility. Going from zero to 355 cited pages in three months is a strong, concrete data point for a market that most competitors aren’t yet measuring or reporting on at all.
Semrush’s AI Search report shows this shift directly, tracking visibility, mentions, and cited pages across ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode, and Gemini for the same July to October window.
The Challenge We Faced
Screed had firm deadlines on the development side; the rebuild needed to be live within a set window, and that timeline didn’t move even as the scope of work, custom design, full WooCommerce catalog setup, and clean code from scratch remained demanding. Running SEO in parallel added another layer of coordination on top of an already tight schedule.
To hit those deadlines without cutting corners on quality, the development team put in extended hours during key stretches of the project, including working outside standard hours when a milestone needed to be closed. That wasn’t the plan for every week of the engagement, but when deadlines were at risk, the team prioritized getting Screed’s site live on schedule over pushing the date back.
How We Delivered
Technical issues that came up during the build were resolved as they surfaced rather than logged for a later fix. Because development and SEO were run by the same team, a problem on one side didn’t have to wait on a separate vendor’s schedule to get addressed; it got handled in the same conversation. That coordination, combined with the extra hours during crunch points, is what kept the project on schedule end to end.
Testimonial
In Screed’s Own Words
