How Below Zero Media's 11-page audit uncovered 12 technical issues costing Epic Pools rankings, traffic, and leads — and the 90-day recovery plan to put them back in front of buyers in Peoria, East Peoria, and Central Illinois.
Epic Pools is a BBB A+ accredited pool builder serving Peoria, East Peoria, Edwards, and the surrounding Central Illinois market. In early 2026 they shipped a brand-new WordPress site on the epic-pools-2026 theme. The rebuild looked modern on every screen. It also dropped them off page one for the queries their buyers actually type into Google and ChatGPT.
Meanwhile their competitors — a white-labeled Leisure Pools dealer in Bloomington, a Pekin fiberglass installer, and a multi-city chain based 40 miles away — were eating every pool-builder search in the Peoria metro.
Over 11 pages we documented every technical and content gap between Epic Pools and the companies outranking them. The shortlist:
| Issue | Impact | Severity |
|---|---|---|
| Zero schema.org markup — no LocalBusiness, FAQPage, AggregateRating, or Review schema anywhere on the site | AI search (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) can't parse the site into machine-readable business info. This is the #1 reason Epic is invisible to AI. | Critical |
| Reviews page says "Coming Soon" | Every review-seeker who lands on the dedicated reviews URL bounces immediately. Social proof lost at the moment of decision. | Critical |
| FAQ mentions zero local cities — 14 questions, not one says "Peoria" or "Central Illinois" | FAQ content is the fastest way to rank for voice and AI search. Without local signal, the FAQ works for no one. | Critical |
| Old URLs return 404 — the rebuild moved /fiberglass-pools/ to /pools-info/fiberglass/ with no redirect | Every inbound link from directories, Google results, and partner sites now lands on a dead page. Authority erodes every day. | Critical |
| Gallery photos labeled with out-of-market cities (Evansville, Richmond, Jasper) and no alt text | The gallery carries zero local SEO weight — and hints to Google that Epic serves markets it doesn't. | High |
| No service-area pages — every competitor has 5-16 city-specific landing pages | Without a /pool-builder-peoria-il/ or /pool-installation-east-peoria/ page, Epic can't compete for city-level queries. | High |
| Thin service pages — "Weekly Service", "Pool Opening", etc. have generic copy and no local context | Service pages are where the commercial intent traffic converts. Thin pages don't rank and don't convert. | High |
| Zero blog content on the new site | Freshness signal = 0. Competitors publish monthly. Google rewards active sites. | High |
| No analytics installed — no GA4, no pixel, no tag manager | No way to measure what's working. Every marketing dollar spent is spent blind. | High |
| NAP inconsistency across directories — two addresses on BBB, one on the site, variants in Yelp | AI search and Google reward identical business name + address + phone across the web. Inconsistency dilutes ranking. | Medium |
| Missing from Houzz and Angi / HomeAdvisor | Both platforms feed Google's local pack and AI answers. Every competitor is listed; Epic isn't. | Medium |
| Crawl-delay: 10s in robots.txt | Slows down indexing of every new page Epic publishes. Easy fix with a huge compounding payoff. | Medium |
Two things — and they're the exact things most modern WordPress rebuilds forget:
Every item in this plan is either a direct technical fix we ship, or content Epic's team writes with a template we provide. No vague "improve your SEO" language. Specific files, specific pages, specific deadlines.
Epic Pools is the pattern, not the exception. We see this every week: a small business invests in a beautiful rebuild, the design agency hands over the keys, nobody tests for SEO regression, and rankings quietly erode for months. By the time the owner notices the drop in calls, the site has been losing leads for half a year.
The fix isn't a redesign. It's a technical recovery plan grounded in what AI search and Google actually read — and a content strategy grounded in what your buyers actually type. That's what we ship.
We'll run the same 11-page audit on your site and show you exactly what's leaking leads — for free, with no call required.
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