This one is not about remodeling. It is about the website you are reading, why it was rebuilt from nothing this month, and what an outside audit found when it looked at the old one. We are publishing it because the same audit would have been useful to us five years ago, and because a contractor who asks homeowners to trust their process should be willing to show their own.
The work was done by HashWhales. The audit below is theirs. The uncomfortable parts are ours.
The finding that mattered more than the rest
The old site carried a single line of code telling Google not to list it.
That is the whole explanation for something we had been confused about for years. We have been working in Hamilton County since 2012, we had a portfolio, and we were not appearing in search. Not ranking badly — not appearing. The audit checked Google, Yelp, Houzz and BBB for remodeling companies in Fishers, Carmel, Noblesville and Westfield. Our competitors came up every time. We did not come up once.
A noindex tag is one line. It is usually switched on while a site is being
built and switched off at launch, and ours never got switched off. Every week it
stayed on was a week somebody in Fishers searched for exactly what we do and
found somebody else.
Worth saying plainly, because it is the honest state of things: that flag lives on the old Wix site, and removing it there is still on the list. This rebuild is indexable from the first day it goes live. The old one is not fixed by us writing about it.
What else the audit found
It was one page. Everything we do — bathrooms, kitchens, basements, flooring, fireplaces, trim, decks — lived on a single scrolling page. That cannot compete for the dozens of different things people actually type. Someone searching how a shower gets waterproofed and someone searching what a basement finish costs are different people with different questions, and one page answers neither of them properly.
The navigation was broken. About, Services and Projects all pointed at the same address. Three menu items, one destination.
The page title said "Home". The single most valuable line of text in a search result, spent on a word that describes nothing.
There was no structured data. Nothing told Google what kind of business this is, which cities we serve, or that we are a business at all rather than a page about remodeling.
Twenty-four large photographs loaded on one page. On a phone, on a normal connection, that is a slow page — and most people who look at us are on a phone.
There was no analytics and no Search Console. No numbers, so no way to tell whether anything we did worked.
What changed
The site you are on is a rebuild, not a patch.
One page became a structure. There are now separate pages for bathroom remodeling, kitchen remodeling and basement finishing, service pages for each trade, and pages for the places we actually drive to — Fishers, Carmel, Noblesville, Westfield, Geist and across Hamilton County into Indianapolis. Each one is written from that place's own facts: which authority issues the permit, what the housing stock is like, what we find when we open the walls there.
The links work. Every internal link on the site is checked automatically now. There are several hundred of them and none of them go nowhere.
The photographs are served properly. They are delivered in a modern format — AVIF, which is smaller than the WebP the audit asked for — and sized to the screen asking for them rather than shipped full-size to a phone.
Search engines are told what this is. Every page carries a title written for the thing that page is about, a description, a canonical address, a preview card for when somebody shares the link, and structured data connecting the business, the site, each service and each page into one graph. There is a sitemap listing every page and every photograph on it.
There is a blog. You are in it. Fifty posts at the time of writing, a hundred more scheduled, on the parts of a remodel that decide how it turns out — what goes behind bathroom tile, the egress window numbers Indiana actually requires, how to read an itemized estimate. None of it is a sales pitch. It is the stuff we explain on every walkthrough anyway.
The form asks for an email, not just a phone number, because plenty of people look at contractors at ten at night and are not ready to talk to anyone. There is a WhatsApp option now too, and call buttons that stay on screen on a phone.
What we have deliberately not done
This is the part most rebuild announcements leave out.
We are not publishing our own prices. The audit recommended ranges. We publish independent market research instead — what third parties say people in the Indianapolis area spend — always labeled as theirs, never as ours. A number written before anyone has seen your bathroom is a guess, and we would rather give you a real one after a walkthrough than a comfortable one before.
There are no reviews on this site yet. The audit is right that this is where we lose work. We are collecting them properly rather than writing them ourselves, and they will go up when they exist. Until then this site has no third-party proof on it, and you should weigh that.
There are no before-and-after photographs. We did not take "before" shots for years, so we do not have them, and we are not going to stage them. From this month every job gets photographed before anything comes out. That is a fix that takes a year to show up, not a week.
The wording "licensed professionals" is not yet backed by anything you can check. It appears in our copy in three places. Nothing is published on this site that lets you verify it independently, and we would rather name that here than let it sit quietly. It is on the list.
There is still no privacy policy or terms page. Both are outstanding.
The domain is still indiana-remodeling.com while we are All Over
Remodeling everywhere else. That one is a decision, not a task, and it has not
been made yet.
Update, August 20: it has been made. This site now lives at
alloverremodeling.com. indiana-remodeling.com was not taken over — it
stays with the site it always pointed at.
How the blog gets published
Small thing, but it is the kind of detail that usually gets faked, so: the posts here carry real dates and the site honors them. The back catalog went up one post a day. What is scheduled ahead goes up two a day, and a scheduled post is genuinely not reachable before its date — it is not in the index, not in the sitemap, and the address returns a 404 rather than quietly showing early. The pages re-check hourly, so a post arrives on its own day without anybody redeploying anything.
There is also an automated check that runs over every post before it ships. It
fails the build on a link that goes nowhere, on a post that links forward to one
that has not been published yet, on any dollar figure that does not trace back
to a cited source, and on a short list of things this site is not allowed to
claim — a warranty, a guarantee, a testimonial, a certification, a price of our
own. It also catches British spellings, which turned out to matter: the first
drafts came back full of colour and labour and worktop, and a Fishers
contractor whose website says worktop is not a Fishers contractor.
What we are actually measuring
The starting point is zero. Not a low number — zero, because a page Google is told to ignore does not have a position to improve on.
What we watch from here: how many pages are in the index at all; whether we appear on the first page for the handful of "service plus city" searches that actually bring work; how long the site takes to become usable on a phone; how many reviews exist; and how many enquiries arrive that we can trace back to search rather than to somebody already knowing our name.
None of those move in a week. The indexing fix is immediate and the rest is months. We would rather write that down now than describe it as fast later.
Who did the work
HashWhales built this. Concretely, in one pass: the indexing fix, the seven pages of structure this section describes, the schema.org markup connecting the business, the site and every page into one graph, the sitemap and Open Graph cards, the move of every photograph off the old Wix account and onto ours, and the blog you are reading — over a hundred and fifty posts, scheduled rather than dumped all at once. That is the actual scope, and it is the honest version of "what changed," rather than a line about how the process felt.
Worth saying anyway: they were easy to work with. We told them what was wrong and what we do not want claimed, and the site came back matching both — no runaround, no guessing at what we meant.
Why we are telling you this
Because it is the same argument we make about remodeling.
The parts of a job that decide whether it lasts are the parts you cannot see after it is finished — the waterproofing, the substrate, whether the joists got looked at. A website is the same shape of problem. Ours looked fine. It was also, in the only way that counted, switched off.
If you want to see the work rather than read about the site, the gallery is here. If you want somebody to come and look at your house, ask for an estimate — a free walkthrough, measured on site, and a written estimate with materials and labor itemized before anyone picks up a tool.