Hillz Exquisites is a Lagos-based automotive company offering premium car sales, rentals, diagnostics, repairs, upgrades, and consultation. When I joined the project in April 2026, its website was newly built and had no established organic search presence.

My three-month engagement was therefore not about improving an existing SEO program. I had to build the search strategy alongside the website itself.

I audited the site, researched competitors, mapped keywords to commercial pages, wrote and optimized website copy, tailored URLs for search, planned the structure and keyword targeting of vehicle landing pages, established Hillz's Google Business Profile, and worked closely with the developer on technical SEO. I also held regular strategy meetings with the managing partner, Rowland, to make sure the website's messaging and search strategy reflected the company's wider vision.

The first major test was deliberately simple: could a brand-new Hillz website rank for a commercially relevant local search?

I created a test article targeting car rental searches in Lekki.

It worked!

The article reached the top organic result in the Google snapshots captured for "where to rent a car in Lekki" and "how to rent a car in Lekki."

For a new website, that was more than an isolated ranking win. It was evidence that the SEO structure being built around Hillz was beginning to work.

What Was The Problem?

Simple.

Hillz had a much broader business than its new website initially communicated through search.

The company sells premium vehicles, offers executive rentals, and provides diagnostics, repairs, upgrades, and automotive consultation. Its current inventory includes vehicles listed specifically for sale as well as vehicles available for rent, with dedicated pages for individual models.

The business itself was not the problem. The search visibility was.

There was no established ranking history to build on, no mature keyword architecture across the site's commercial pages, and no organic presence connecting Hillz with people searching for the services it provides.

That created two challenges.

First, Google needed to understand a new website covering several distinct automotive services.

Second, potential customers needed to be able to discover Hillz without already knowing the brand.

The objective was therefore to build a website that could compete for non-branded search demand across the different parts of the business, while keeping the brand positioning intact.

The SEO Strategy

I approached the project from the structure upward.

Rather than treating SEO as something that would be added after the website was finished, I worked alongside development and brand strategy so that search intent could influence the site architecture, copy, URLs, landing pages, and content from the beginning.

The strategy centered on three priorities:

Building the site's search architecture

The first priority was making the website understandable to both users and search engines.

I audited the site structure, keyword opportunities, URLs, internal linking, page content, and technical health. I then mapped relevant search terms to the pages that could realistically satisfy them.

This applied across the full business.

A customer searching for a vehicle to buy has a different intent from someone looking to rent one for a few days. Someone looking for diagnostics or repairs has a different problem as well.

The site therefore needed separate commercial pathways for:

Car sales: Model and vehicle-specific purchase searches.
Car rentals: Location, rental type, and vehicle-specific searches.
Diagnostics and repairs: Service and problem-led searches from vehicle owners.
Upgrades and consultation: Searches from customers looking for specialist automotive support.

The objective was not to make one page rank for everything. It was to give each important search intent a relevant destination.

Translating the strategy into the website

I wrote and optimized the web copy across the site's core pages, integrating relevant keywords while keeping the language aligned with Hillz's premium positioning.

I also worked on SEO-focused URL structures and keyword targeting for the vehicle pages.

This was particularly important because Hillz's inventory is not a simple catalogue. Some vehicles are presented for purchase while others are offered for rental. The pages therefore need to communicate the right commercial intent to both Google and the customer.

The current site reflects this structure, with separate sales and rental inventory and individual vehicle pages containing commercial information such as purchase prices, rental rates, specifications, and booking or viewing actions.

I also created mockups for the vehicle landing pages and worked through how the pages should be structured and keyworded before development.

Establishing local relevance

Because Hillz operates from Elegushi, Lekki, local search was an important part of the initial strategy.

I created the business profile, researched local competitors, and identified search opportunities where Hillz's location and service offering could give it a genuine advantage.

This made Lekki a useful starting point for testing whether the new domain could gain visibility for commercially relevant searches.

The Test

I did not want to scale an unproven content strategy.

The first objective was to validate that Google could understand Hillz as a relevant result for a high-intent local query.

So I created a draft article: ''How to Rent a Car in Lekki, Lagos (Without Getting It Wrong)''

The article was intentionally used as a test.

The query cluster was commercially relevant, geographically specific, and closely connected to an existing Hillz service. If the content could rank, it would provide evidence that the site had enough topical and local relevance to begin competing in organic search.

It did!

In the Google search screenshots captured during the project, the article appeared as the top organic result for: "where to rent a car in Lekki" and "how to rent a car in Lekki."

That result mattered because neither query is branded. The searcher did not have to know Hillz existed. They simply had to be looking for a car rental option in Lekki.

The Result

The first SEO result was therefore not a traffic spike. It was search validation.

A newly built website had begun appearing for searches generated by the market rather than by existing brand awareness.

That demonstrated that the underlying approach was viable.

The test also gave the broader content strategy a direction. Rather than producing articles based on generic automotive topics, I could identify search terms with clear commercial intent, test them, measure the response, and expand the strategy based on what Google rewarded.

The technical side of the project progressed alongside the search work.

The June 20 project snapshot recorded:

100/100: Ahrefs Site Audit Health Score

63: Crawled URLs
554: Crawled links
154: Referring domain

These figures are project snapshots, not claims of long-term performance. Their role in the case study is to show the technical and crawlable footprint that had been established during the engagement. — These figures are project snapshots, not claims of long-term performance. Their role in this case study is to show the technical and crawlable footprint that had been established during the engagement.

Connecting Search to Hillz's Commercial Offering

The ranking test was only useful because Hillz had a commercial website behind it.

The user who discovers the brand through a rental search can move into Hillz's rental inventory. A user searching for a specific vehicle can reach an individual vehicle page. A vehicle owner looking for diagnostics or repairs can enter through a dedicated service page.

This is what made the broader SEO strategy commercially useful.

The goal was not to create a blog that attracts visitors independently of the business. It was to build connections between search intent and the services Hillz actually sells. And the current website supports that model with distinct service areas for sales, rentals, diagnostics, repairs, upgrades, and consultation.

Where the Project Left Hillz

By the end of the three-month engagement, Hillz had moved from a newly launched website with no established search history to one that had demonstrated the ability to reach the top of the organic results for relevant local searches.

More importantly, the website had an SEO structure designed around the actual business.

The work had established:

Keyword-led website copy
SEO-focused URL structures
Search intent mapping across commercial pages
Keyword and structure planning for vehicle landing pages
Local search infrastructure
Competitor research to guide positioning
Technical SEO coordination during development
A validated content strategy based on an actual ranking test

Hillz was no longer starting from an unstructured website and hoping Google would figure it out.

It had a search strategy.

Overall Results

The initial engagement established an SEO foundation and produced early proof that the strategy could generate organic visibility.

Top organic result for "where to rent a car in Lekki" in the captured Google results
Top organic result for "how to rent a car in Lekki" in the captured Google results
100/100 Ahrefs Site Audit Health Score
63 crawled URLs in the June project snapshot
554 crawled links in the June project snapshot
154 referring domains in the June project snapshot

More importantly, the project validated the underlying hypothesis: Hillz could earn non-branded search visibility even as a newly launched website.

What's Next?

The first ranking test was a starting point of course, not the destination.

Hillz's business creates multiple search opportunities across vehicle sales, rentals, diagnostics, repairs, upgrades, and consultation. Its inventory also provides a growing pool of commercial pages that can be optimized around specific models and purchase or rental intent.

The next stage would be to expand the keyword clusters that show the strongest commercial potential, strengthen the relevant landing pages, deepen local authority, and continue turning the vehicle inventory and service offering into searchable assets.

The initial question was whether a new Hillz website could earn meaningful visibility in search.

The answer was yes.

The opportunity now is to scale that visibility across the rest of the business.

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Case Study 1

How I Built Hillz Exquisites’ SEO Strategy From the Ground Up and Got It to Google's Page #1