Case study: six weeks of SEO for a car remapper in Chester

Chester Tuning's new website went live on 22 July 2026. In the six weeks to 3 September, Google Search Console recorded 96 clicks and 4,131 impressions, the brand search settled at position 2, and the main money term, "car remapping chester", moved from position 25 in the first fortnight to position 4.5 in the last. The final two weeks brought 52 clicks, more than the whole of the first month. That money term has still not produced a single click, and the reason is the map pack, not the website. This is the first instalment; the three-month and six-month figures are planned to follow in the same format.

Chester Tuning is Paul Duffield's mobile ECU remapping business, covering Chester, Cheshire and the Wirral. We built the site and run the SEO on a monthly retainer. Paul agreed to let us publish the real numbers, including the parts that have not worked, because most case studies show one screenshot from the best month. Every figure below is from Search Console unless we say otherwise, and a six-week-old site is noisy: the direction is clear, the totals are small.

What we started with on 22 July

A new domain with no history: zero impressions in the 150 days before launch. One Google review, and 24 on Facebook at 4.8 stars. The site went live with eight service pages carrying prices, ten town pages, two vehicle pages, three guides, sixteen of Paul's own job photos, and a reviews page rendered in the HTML so Google can read the stars. The sitemap went to Google and Bing on launch day and every page was requested for indexing by hand.

Weeks one to four: indexed, brand won, money term on page two

Week one produced 12 clicks and 322 impressions at an average position of 41. Four of those clicks were people typing "chester tuning", which sat at 2.6 in week one and 2.0 from week two onward; Search Console hides the rare searches, so the rest are unattributed. The brand search is the first thing a new local site earns, and it arrived inside seven days.

On 11 August, eighteen days in, the first full read showed 22 clicks and 1,094 impressions, with "car remapping chester" at position 20.7, served by the homepage rather than the Chester town page we had built for it. We published a fourth guide that day, on how to tell if a car has been remapped.

Week four, 12 to 18 August, was the first real movement: 12 clicks, 601 impressions, average position 26.6, and the money term at 5.2 for the week. On 21 August we checked the live result by eye rather than trusting an average: organic position 14, and third of three in the map pack. The two businesses above had 235 and 66 Google reviews. Chester Tuning had 7. That one line explained the zero clicks better than any ranking report.

Weeks five and six: the month-two changes, and what moved

On 21 August we shipped the changes the data asked for. Eighteen page titles were rewritten, because fourteen ran past 60 characters. The Chester town page was redirected into the homepage: in four weeks it had 238 impressions, no clicks, and lost to the homepage on all twelve searches it appeared for. A Heswall page was added, because "car remapping heswall" had 93 impressions at position 19.9, no map pack on the result, and nobody targeting the town specifically. A cost guide went up, and each town page's structured data was corrected to claim only its own town.

One caveat we owe you: Google's August 2026 spam update rolled out from 19 to 21 August, on top of that deploy. We cannot separate the two, so read the next fortnight as direction, not proof.

Week five: 9 clicks, 712 impressions. Week six: 28 clicks, 1,106 impressions. Then 8 clicks on 2 September and 11 on 3 September, the two best days the site has had. The guide on remapped cars took 262 impressions and 7 clicks in the last fortnight at an average position of 6.8. The Heswall page reached 8.9 on its exact search within fourteen days. The cost guide had 391 impressions and no clicks at position 69, which is how most guides start.

The key searches, first fortnight against last

First fortnight is 22 July to 4 August; last is 21 August to 3 September. Position, with impressions in brackets.

• "chester tuning": 2.3 (36) to 1.9 (39). 26 clicks in six weeks, more than any other visible search.
• "car remapping chester": 24.6 (48) to 4.5 (55). 161 impressions in six weeks, no clicks.
• "car remapping heswall": 30.7 (43) to 10.7 (49).
• "car remapping wirral": 39.9 (45) to 21.8 (50).
• "cheshire tuning": 11.0 (1) to 9.6 (14).
• "remapping near me": not shown in the first fortnight, 4.1 (10) in the last.

Two more figures for scale. Mobile accounts for 74 of the 96 clicks. And about a quarter of the impressions Search Console can attribute to a search come from Google matching "chester" inside Winchester, Colchester and Dorchester. Those 677 impressions have never produced a click and they drag the average position down. If anyone reports an average position to you, ask whether that noise is in it.

What has not worked

The Chester town page. A homepage whose title already says Chester beat it on every search: four weeks of exposure, no clicks, redirected. We would not build one again for the town the homepage is already about.

No clicks on the money term. Page 1 for a fortnight, 161 impressions, nothing. On a phone the map pack sits above the organic results, and a profile with 12 reviews in third place loses to one with 235 in first. The website cannot fix that.

The plan for the next towns. Our roadmap said Northwich or Crewe in month two. Ninety days of data showed zero impressions for Northwich, Crewe, Runcorn and Rhyl combined, so we built Heswall instead. The plan was wrong and the data was right.

Our own pace on the basics. No directory listings until week six and no analytics until week five. Both are late, and the client report says so.

What Paul did

Reviews, mostly. He asked customers for Google reviews and the count went from 1 at launch to 7 by mid-August and 12 by 27 August, all five stars. That is the reason the profile is in the map pack at all. He supplied the job photos, confirmed the address and hours, and told us which services he does and does not offer, so the site sells what he sells. Google's own "interactions" figure for the profile, which lumps calls, website taps and direction requests together, went from about 2 in the four months before launch to 12 in July and 34 in the first half of August. Paul told us the profile brought three jobs in one week in late August; his count, not ours, because Google does not yet let us separate the calls.

The website cannot move a review count. The owner can, and that is what decides whether page one turns into the phone ringing.

What six weeks tells you

For a mobile trade based in a town, the website's job in the first two months is to get indexed, win the brand search, and put the money pages in position for when the map pack catches up. Chester Tuning did all three inside six weeks on a £200 a month retainer, and the thing that decides whether clicks follow is a review count only the owner can move. September is a measurement month: the 21 August changes need three to four weeks to settle before we judge them, and the three-month figures will go here when they are in.

If you want a remap around Chester or the Wirral, Paul is at chestertuning.co.uk. If you run a trade business in Chester or Wrexham and want your own numbers reported this plainly, our SEO in Chester page explains how we work, and you can tell us what you are trying to rank for.