How We Got Birmingham Glass Found In Google And ChatGPT

How We Got Birmingham Glass Found In Google And ChatGPT 

Birmingham Glass rebuilt their website and promptly disappeared from Google. No rankings, no organic traffic, nothing. Thirty-odd years of fitting windows, doors, and double glazing across the Midlands, a reputation built almost entirely on people recommending them to their neighbours, and suddenly you couldn’t find them online if you went looking. 

Getting them back took five minutes. Getting them properly found took considerably longer, and most of that work was dull. That’s usually the way with marketing that actually shifts anything. 

1. The website that vanished

The culprit was a sitemap error. Small, boring, and completely missed by their previous agency, which meant search engines had stopped crawling the site altogether. 

As Todd, Director at Spaghetti Agency, said at the time: 

“We actually started with Mike right at the very beginning of his journey fixing a very, very simple thing with his site map, because he was no longer on Google. After a five-minute fix, he’s been a client of ours for many years.” 

Five minutes. That was the whole fix. 

And that’s the bit worth sitting with, because if something that small can wipe an entire business off Google, it’s fair to ask whether something similar is quietly happening to yours. Most people never check. They assume the enquiries dried up because the market got tough. 

2. Then the unglamorous bit

With the site back where it belonged, Mike moved all his marketing over to us. 

We rewrote the website copy so it actually sold something. We rebuilt the Google Ads to stop the budget leaking away on clicks that were never going to convert. We started producing content every month: blogs, emails, case studies. Then we designed and built two new websites from scratch, both properly optimised for search and performance. 

As Todd, Director at Spaghetti Agency, said: 

“Over that time, we’ve worked with Mike on lots of content on his website. We’ve even rebuilt his website and optimised the content, especially the blog and the main landing pages for search.” 

Nobody wins awards for internal linking. But this is the work that makes everything else possible, and it’s usually the first thing to get skipped, because it doesn’t demo well in a pitch. 

3. SEO, GEO, and teaching AI who they are

In 2025 we stepped things up. Tighter on-page SEO, better internal linking, and backlinks built to grow authority properly rather than game it. 

Quick word on GEO, because that term is doing two jobs at the moment. When we say GEO here, we mean geographic: pages built around the specific areas Birmingham Glass actually cover. You’ll see other people using GEO to mean generative engine optimisation, which is about turning up inside AI answers. That’s the next bit. 

We shaped the content for AI as well. Clear structure, straight answers, information organised so a machine can follow it without guessing. 

That last part matters more than it sounds. When ChatGPT or Google’s AI answers a question, it’s building that answer out of pages it can actually parse. It needs to find the service, the area covered, and the specifics, stated plainly enough to quote back. If all that’s buried in vague copy about quality and customer focus, there’s nothing to lift, so it quotes whoever spelled it out instead. Being the better company doesn’t come into it. 

4. What actually happened

Set the last 12 months against the whole of 2022, when we started working together, and organic traffic is up 32%. Key events, meaning the things people do when they’re genuinely interested (filling in the form, picking up the phone), are up 35%. 

Overall traffic is up 84%, though we should be straight about that one: it includes the rebuilt Google Ads pulling their weight alongside the organic growth. The 32% is the bit the SEO work can claim on its own. 

Those are the numbers. The better measure is that Birmingham Glass now employ twice as many salespeople as they did when we started. You don’t double a sales team because the graphs look nice. 

Then there’s the one we keep telling people about. Someone photographed a problem with their window, uploaded it to ChatGPT, and asked what to do. ChatGPT told them to speak to Birmingham Glass. That turned into a substantial sale. 

The Google Ads worked so well we had to scale them back, because leads were arriving faster than the team could handle them. Not the worst problem to have. 

As Mike Skerrett, Director at Birmingham Glass, said: 

“Spaghetti Agency are easy to speak to and quick to react. They’re able to interpret my daydream ideas and turn them into marketing reality.” 

TL;DR 

Birmingham Glass rebuilt their website and vanished from Google. The cause was a sitemap error nobody had spotted, and fixing it took five minutes. Everything since has been the slow stuff: better copy, rebuilt ads, two new websites, monthly content, local pages, and structure that AI can actually read. Set the last 12 months against the whole of 2022 and organic traffic is up 32%, key events up 35%, and overall traffic up 84% once the rebuilt ads are counted. More to the point, the sales team has doubled. 

What’s quietly holding yours back? 

Sometimes it’s a five-minute fix. Sometimes it’s a great deal bigger. Either way, you’d rather know than keep wondering why the phone stopped ringing. Contact us and we’ll take a proper look, or have a word with our consultancy team if you’d rather talk strategy first. 

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