Louisiana SEO Case Study: Rebuilding Local Search Visibility for a Thibodaux Marketing Agency
How Make Waves Marketing rebuilt its own Louisiana local search foundation with city pages, service plus city pages, location schema, and crawlable HTML.
Historical implementation study, originally published September 8, 2026. This is a record of site architecture and source-supported search foundations, with no claimed ranking, traffic or lead gains.
Make Waves Marketing rebuilt the local search foundation of its own website, makewavesnow.com, over the summer of 2026. The agency operates from a studio at 203 West Second St. in Thibodaux and serves clients across south Louisiana and into Florida, but the site had been asking one statewide page to carry every city and every service at once. This case study documents the work itself: what was built, in what order, and why. It reports architecture and implementation, not ranking promises. Search results depend on competition, links, reviews, and Google's own judgment, and no agency controls those. What an agency can control is whether a search engine or an AI assistant can find the page, read the page, understand which city and service it covers, and pull a clear answer out of it. The implementation described here addresses those foundations. It does not establish indexing or ranking gains.
The starting problem
The historical review identified a need for city-specific service content and useful initial HTML for crawlers. The site uses client-side routing, so its search-document delivery needed explicit attention. Current source includes a public route registry, per-route metadata and build-time rendering for eligible public pages.
What was built
City pages with a real reason to exist
Location pages were created for Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Lafayette, Houma and Thibodaux, and Mandeville. Each names the area it serves, describes the work the agency does there, and links to the services a visitor from that city is most likely to want.
Service plus city pages
Above the city pages sit pages that combine one service with one city, such as web design in Baton Rouge and web design in Jacksonville. These pages connect a service to a specific area, with a path to contact the team.
Location markup that matches the visible page
Each location page carries structured data describing the business as a professional service, with the real Thibodaux address and coordinates and the service areas listed separately. An earlier version of the markup combined the Thibodaux street address with a different city's name, which is exactly the kind of mismatch that makes structured data untrustworthy. Markup now states one real address and expresses coverage through service areas, so the machine-readable version of the business matches the visible one.
Head tags and links baked into the HTML
Eligible public routes are written at build time with page-specific titles, descriptions, canonicals and structured data. The prerender system also supplies initial page content and links. Protected pricing, account and store paths have explicit exclusions so private visitor state and paid files are kept out of shared HTML. Automated checks cover metadata duplication and sitemap output; they do not establish rankings or indexing.
Legacy paths in the current site
The source contains mappings for selected legacy paths, including the former case-study hub and earlier site paths. This study does not verify redirect deployment on old domains or claim a count of migrated links.
The order the work was done in
Sequence mattered more than volume.
- Crawl and index eligibility first. A page nothing can read cannot rank, no matter how good the copy is.
- Then page and task fit. One page for one job, in one city.
- Then internal links. Service to city, city back to service, article to service.
- Then structured data, matched to what the page visibly says.
- Then answer-focused copy, so the page states its answer early enough for an AI assistant to lift it.
Reversing that order is the common mistake. Adding schema to a page a crawler cannot read produces nothing.
What a Louisiana business can take from this
A Louisiana business can review whether its service and location pages answer distinct customer needs, whether crawlers can read the initial content, and whether its business details agree across the site and profiles. More pages alone do not establish better search performance.
The pages built here are live and inspectable: web design in Louisiana, SEO and AI search, and the city pages linked from each.
What is not claimed here
No traffic figure, ranking position, or lead count appears in this case study, because the work described is recent and attributing movement to it this early would be guesswork. The verifiable claims are the ones above: which pages exist, what markup they carry, what a crawler receives, and the selected legacy-path mappings present in source. Old-domain redirect deployment is not verified here.
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