Haas Systems: A 2001 Template Rebuilt for Modern Local Search

The Challenge

Haas Systems has protected homes and businesses across Southwest Michigan since 1980. The business is solid. The website was not.

haassystems.com was a single static page built on an AT&T template from 2001 that had never been properly rebuilt. A pre-build audit turned up problems that were quietly costing the company every day:

• The meta description Google displayed still advertised AT&T. The original template was never updated.
• The stylesheet pointed to an internal office server that the public internet could not reach, so the page loaded completely unstyled for every visitor.
• A service page still advertised fire extinguisher work Haas had sold off in 2009, while saying little about the commercial fire alarm work they do every day.
• The Google Business Profile was unclaimed, with zero reviews.
• Of the handful of keywords the site ranked for, most were people hunting a Fire-Lite alarm-panel manual (a stray PDF sitting on the server), not anyone looking for Haas.

Despite all of that, Haas still held a top-5 organic position for “security systems dowagiac mi” on the strength of the business name alone. The opportunity was not subtle: a modern site, built correctly, would put Haas in a commanding position across the region with almost no competitive pressure.

Our Approach

A complete rebuild, modern and mobile-first, built around what Haas actually does today.

Visual Design

• Integrated the modern vector logo delivered mid-project
• Preserved the vintage 1980 mark on the About page for personality
• Anchored the burgundy palette to the company’s actual building paint color

Technical Development

• Rebuilt as a fast static site on Astro, ending the 2001-era infrastructure and the unreachable stylesheet
• Self-hosted on the client’s own managed server, delivered as a packaged handoff with no ongoing hosting dependency
• Contact form routed to the right inbox with spam protection, plus security headers, clean redirects, and a proper 404

SEO Strategy and Content

• Rewrote the site in plain-spoken, code-literate trade language and corrected the service list to match what Haas offers now
• Added LocalBusiness and ElectricianBusiness structured data on the home page and Service schema on each service
• Shipped a sitemap and an AI-crawler allowlist, and delivered a playbook for claiming and optimizing the Google Business Profile, the single biggest local-search lever the company had

Accessibility was rebuilt from the ground up rather than patched, taking Lighthouse accessibility from 66 to 100.

The Outcome

The new site scores 100 in every Lighthouse category. Measured before and after on mobile:

Performance stayed at 100 while accessibility, best practices and SEO all reached 100. More importantly, the problems that were actively hurting the business are gone: the unstyled page, the AT&T meta description, and the outdated service list have all been replaced by a fast, accessible, correctly-structured site with local schema in place.

A re-audit in September 2026 found the site’s overall SEO audit health up from 21% to 75%, with all sixteen critical on-page failures from April fixed. Haas now holds the #2 local pack spot for “commercial security dowagiac”.

Organic traffic is not reported here. Analytics and Search Console were not in place during the site’s first three months, so there is no measured traffic data to quote. Ranking and local-pack movement will be added once measurement is running.