Case study
Fish On MT
Web / Brand / SEO / Paid social
fishonmt.comA site nobody could find, and not much reason to stay once they did. Rebuilt, rebranded, and set up to be found.
The situation
Six pages and a phone number
The old site drew a few hundred visits a month. Not a collapse, just a charter business doing well on the water and close to invisible everywhere else.
Six pages, hand-written in HTML. The homepage led with a phone number set enormous. What we offer was a column of underlined links: half day, full day, private scenic tours.
Which meant the trips had no pages. No page for Flathead Lake, none for Fort Peck, none for the Little Bitterroot. People search for the water they want to fish, and there was nothing on the water to find.
Nothing measured any of it either. No analytics, no tracking of any kind. No way to tell which pages did anything, where anyone came from, or whether the site was being used at all.
The rebuild
A new site and a new identity, at once
Next.js, designed from scratch on Fish On's own colours. The site also debuted their new visual identity, so the rebuild and the rebrand landed together rather than one waiting on the other.
Search
Built for what people actually search
Eleven pages live now, against six before. Four of them services: fishing charters, ice fishing, scenic tours, cook your catch. Then the pages people read before they book but nobody thinks to write. A fishing report that updates daily. How to get a Montana fishing license. The FAQ, the guides, the boats.
Twenty-three more are built and waiting on the booking launch, one per water and trip length: Flathead Lake full day, half day and evening; Flathead River; Little Bitterroot; Nelson Reservoir; Fort Peck; Smith Lake ice; Wild Horse Island. People search by the water, so that is how they are built. None of them are live yet, and none of the numbers below are theirs.
Local
Marked up for where it is
LocalBusiness markup carrying the Lakeside address, the coordinates, hours, phone and price range. Service and Offer entries on every trip. FAQ markup on four pages, breadcrumbs throughout, the guides marked up as people with their credentials, and areaServed covering the waters and the state.
The sitemap generates from the trip data rather than being kept by hand, so a new trip is a new indexed page and not a job someone remembers to do. Search Console reads back into the site itself, so the queries people arrive on are visible without leaving the admin.
What changed
Four thousand nine hundred a month
Across ninety days, 22 May to 19 August 2026, the site took 14,763 sessions. Roughly 4,900 a month, against a few hundred before.
Two thirds of that is paid, and it would be easy to stop there and call it a twenty-fold result. The number worth looking at is smaller. Organic search alone runs about 874 sessions a month, roughly four times what the entire old site drew, on a channel it effectively did not have.
Paid socialpaid
5,291 · 30% · 7s
Cross-networkpaid
3,517 · 59% · 35s
Organic search
2,623 · 74% · 52s
Direct
1,345 · 63% · 38s
Paid searchpaid
1,120 · 73% · 41s
Organic social
786 · 74% · 28s
Bar length is sessions. The coral length inside it is the sessions that engaged, drawn to the same scale.
Read the coral and the ranking inverts. Paid social brings the most people and holds them for seven seconds. Organic search brings a third as many and holds them for fifty-two, engaging at 74% against 30%. The traffic nobody paid for is the traffic that stays.
4x
Organic search against the whole old site
874 sessions a month from search alone, on a site that a year ago had no way of knowing it had any visitors at all.
Where the numbers come from
Everything after launch is Google Analytics 4 for the property, 22 May to 19 August 2026, a window falling entirely after launch. Channel groupings are GA4 defaults and cross-network is counted as paid. Page counts are read from the live sitemap, not from the repository, which holds unlaunched pages.
There is no matching figure from before, because the old site carried no analytics at all. A few hundred a month is the owner's estimate, and it is the only number here that is not measured. The four-times comparison rests on it.