Beacon Auto Care

What was wrong with the site?

Beacon had a website, but it was a mess. Built by one developer, modified by another, abandoned by a third. Slow load times. Schema-free. No internal linking. Mobile experience was rough. The GBP had a five-year-old photo set, weekly posts last published in 2022, and 30+ unreplied reviews across Google and CARFAX.

The owner — Moe — runs the shop. He doesn't have time to think about any of this. His prior arrangement with "the web guy" had been a $300/month retainer that produced one or two updates a year. He'd let it expire. Nothing had filled the gap. That retainer story is the canonical version of what burns small operators on digital vendors.

What did the rebuild include?

We took the keys: GBP login, hosting, domain, Tekmetric (their shop management system), Google Workspace, social profiles. Everything. Then we rebuilt the site from scratch on Astro + Tailwind — roughly 50 pages: a hero homepage, hub pages for major service categories, individual spoke pages for each service (oil change, brake repair, AC service, etc.), an FAQ system across the site, an "about" page that reads like a real shop, a sample DVI walk-through, and a reviews page surfacing every Google/CARFAX/Yelp review in one place.

Underneath: full JSON-LD schema coverage (LocalBusiness, AutoRepair, Service, FAQPage, Review, AggregateRating). Core Web Vitals tuned to green. Trailing-slash canonicalization fixed (an annoying duplicate-content issue we documented as a skill afterward). Sitemap clean. Internal linking deliberate.

On the GBP side: new photo set, 6-week post calendar in Moe's voice, full Q&A library of pre-answered customer questions, services list fully mirrored to the website, NAP audit across all citations. On reviews: same-day reply system with drafts generated by an agent and a thumbs-up gate before posting.

What custom tooling did we build?

Several pieces of this work became reusable Claude Code agents and skills (since promoted to the public library):

• · shop-photo-triage — sorts incoming photo batches by quality, privacy, content type
• · beacon-review-management + beacon-review-reply — drafts replies in Moe's voice, sanity-checked before posting
• · beacon-gbp-management — handles GBP post generation, Q&A, service edits
• · automotive-failure-mode-verify — research-before-write protocol for every technical claim on the site
• · tekmetric-data-feed — anchors oil specs and fluid capacities to Tekmetric's authoritative data
• · trailing-slash-canonicalization — three-layer fix for duplicate-content indexing

What were the results?

Specific quarter-over-quarter organic traffic, GBP impressions, and review volume numbers will be added here once we have full quarterly Search Console and GBP Insights snapshots to anchor them. We don't quote numbers we can't show.

More importantly: Moe doesn't think about it. He runs the shop. He texts us when something needs to happen ("hey, new review came in," "can you add this service to GBP," "our domain renewal email looks suspicious"). We handle it. We text back when it's done. That's the deal.

Why does this matter for other shops?

This work is the template for everything Tend the Tech does. Same approach for any small operator: take the keys, rebuild what needs rebuilding, tend what needs tending, get out of the owner's way. The Moe Story — Moe panicking at a "review" trigger word, then disproportionately grateful when we said "don't worry, I'll take care of it" — is literally the canonical brand brief on this site. Beacon was the proof of concept. Now we're scaling it.