Home / Case Studies / Video Production Studio
They had the reel. Google had someone else’s studio.
Video production studio · East coast, Australia · Published anonymously
The work was excellent. National brands, real budgets, a reel that would win the job in the room. The site scored 36 out of 100 on the things that decide whether a buyer ever gets to the room. This is the whole teardown, and what we did about it.
- 36 → 87 / 100
- Visibility health, audited before and after. Same test, same scorer, both times.
- 4.5s → 0.9s
- Load speed on the heaviest pages, once 312KB of video player code stopped loading before anyone pressed play.
- 23 → 48 pages
- Every one a real page with a job to do. Not a single thin one.
Where it started
Nothing wrong with the work.
This one is not a tradie. It is a video production studio, and we are publishing it here because the pattern is identical to every trade business we tear down, just with better lighting.
They shoot for national brands. The films are genuinely good. Put the reel in front of a buyer and the job is usually won.
That was the problem. Everything depended on getting the reel in front of someone, and every part of the site that was supposed to do that was quietly broken.
The constraint was never the work. It was being found, and being believed.
What the teardown found
Six things. None of them visible from the front.
The owner could not have spotted any of these by looking at his own site. They only show up when you go through it the way a search engine does.
- 1
Google was describing a different company
Search the business name and Google's AI summary confidently described another firm in another state, with a similar name and someone else's founder. It sat directly under their own search result. A buyer checking them out was reading about strangers.
- 2
Four location pages, near enough to identical
Over 97% the same text as each other, sharing one page title, and the copy contradicted itself: the page for one city said the business was based in another. Google reads that as pages built for search engines rather than people, and it treats them accordingly.
- 3
One page title, on every page
Homepage, every location page, every service page, the contact page. All carrying the same title. That title is the blue line a buyer clicks in the search results. Every page was making the same promise, so no page stood for anything.
- 4
The portfolio was invisible
The individual project pages, the actual proof, the whole reason a buyer picks one studio over another, were left out of the site map entirely. The best work on the site was the least findable thing on it.
- 5
No address, no founder, no about page
Nowhere on the site did it say who ran the business or where they were. The address was sitting public on their Google listing the whole time. For a business selling creative trust, there was nothing on the site to trust.
- 6
About eight seconds to load on a phone
Most of that spent loading video player code for videos nobody had pressed play on yet. The buyer on a phone in a carpark, deciding whether to enquire, was watching a blank screen.
Read them one at a time and each looks survivable. Read them together and you have a business paying to make beautiful films that a buyer either never finds, or finds and cannot verify.
That is what a teardown is for. Not a list of faults. The one stage that is capping everything else.
The call
Rebuild, not patch.
By the time we ran the teardown, they had already hired a web guy.
That is normally where the conversation ends, and fairly enough. Nobody wants to hear that the thing they have just commissioned is pointed at the wrong problem.
They changed course anyway. Not because we sold harder. Because the teardown put six specific, checkable faults in front of them, and a redesign would not have touched a single one. New look, same six faults, same silence.
None of which is a knock on the developer. He was hired to build a better looking website, and by all accounts he would have built one. He was hired for the wrong job. That is not his failure, and it is not really the owner’s either. You cannot write a brief for a problem nobody has shown you yet.
That is what the teardown is for. Not to find someone to blame. To work out which job needs doing, before you pay anyone to do a different one.
We do not recommend a rebuild often. Most sites are worth saving, and a rebuild you did not need is an expensive way to end up where you started.
This one was not worth saving. Every fault traced back to the platform and the template underneath it. Fixing them one at a time meant fighting that template every time, forever, and losing ground on each update.
So it came apart and went back together: a real structure, a page for every project, an interactive cost estimator so a buyer can get a number without an awkward phone call, and the whole thing built to load in under a second.
Then we audited our own rebuild. It scored 77. Not the number we wanted. We published it anyway, fixed what the second audit found, and only then did it reach 87.
Closed out
Every finding, and what happened to it.
-
Eight seconds on mobile
Under one second on the heaviest pages, and 63% less to download
-
Portfolio missing from the site map
Every project page listed, linked and findable
-
Four near-identical location pages
Real pages: services, work, studio, an estimator, and a page per project
-
No structured data worth the name
Full markup, including video markup on every project page
-
No address, no founder, no about page
All three published and consistent everywhere they appear
-
Bare link previews when shared
Proper preview cards on all 23 pages, with a still from the work
-
Missing pages returned a success code
A real, branded not-found page
Every line above was checked on the live build, not ticked off a plan. The biggest single win was the simplest idea: stop loading the video player until someone actually presses play. That one change took 312KB off every project page.
The honest bit
What we cannot claim yet.
There are no lead numbers on this page. The rebuilt site is finished and it is fast, but it has not taken over the live domain yet. Until it does, any enquiry figure we quoted you would be invented. When there is a real one, it goes here.
The 36 and the 87 are audit scores, not sales. They measure whether a buyer can find you and verify you. That is the stage this work was fixing. It is not the same as proof that the phone rings more, and we are not going to blur the two.
We also published the leftovers: the handful of smaller items we chose not to do yet, and why. A fix list with nothing left on it is a sales document, not an audit.
What’s next
The next layer.
The site grew from 23 pages to 48. Not padding: a page for each type of buyer they serve, a page for each kind of film they make, and each one carrying the actual work as proof rather than a stock photo and a promise.
Then five different homepages, all built, all live, all waiting on one decision from the owner. Not mockups in a slide deck. Real pages he can open on his phone and scroll, with everything below the opening screen kept identical so he is choosing one thing and not five at once.
One of them turns his own footage into the motion of the page: scroll down, and the film scrubs frame by frame under your thumb. For a studio that sells cinematography, the site should move like the work does.
That is where it sits now. One number back from him, and it goes live.
Why this matters
You are not a video studio. Read it anyway.
Swap the reel for a set of before-and-after photos and this is a landscaper. Swap it for a compliance certificate and it is a sparky. The specifics move. The pattern does not.
Good operator. Real proof of the work. A shopfront that hides all of it, and an owner with no way of knowing, because from the front the site looks fine.
It always looks fine from the front. That is the whole problem.
Why this is different
It is complicated. That is not a warning.
Most web work is a swap. New theme, new stock photos, a fresh coat, and a month later the enquiries sit exactly where they were, because nothing underneath the paint moved.
Remember that they had already hired someone to do exactly that. It would have looked better. It would have changed nothing, because not one of the six faults was a design problem. Good developer, wrong brief, and the brief is the part almost nobody checks.
Not one thing on the list above was cosmetic. Every one of them sat under the surface, in the part of the site the owner never sees and the average web guy never opens.
That is the honest pitch, and it is a harder sell than a pretty mockup. This takes longer. It costs more than a template. There is a stretch in the middle where you have paid for work you cannot see yet, because the visible part is the last part.
The trade is straightforward. A redesign gives you something to look at. This gives you something that compounds: found, verified, believed, and still working on you in twelve months, whether or not you are paying for ads that month.
If you want it done in a fortnight for a few hundred dollars, we are the wrong people, and we will say so on the call.
Want to know what yours scores?
The Visibility Teardown is the same read, on your business. A recorded walk-through you keep, and a call to talk it through. $497 inc GST, and half of it credits toward whatever you build next.
Or run the free Visibility Check first. It takes about a minute.