Case study: Big Bounce 4 Life, a Birmingham bouncy castle hire firm
Business: Big Bounce 4 Life, bouncy castle and party hire, south Birmingham (bigbounce4life.co.uk Find out more →
Audit carried out: 24–25 September 2026
What this page is: the audit and the plan. It is not a results page yet. We’ll add before-and-after numbers once the fixes have had time to work. We’re not going to claim results that haven’t happened.
Why this case study?
Because it’s fair. Before we ask you to trust us with your business, you can see exactly how our process works on a real local firm, warts and all.
Before and after
The starting point
Big Bounce 4 Life is a busy local business, and most new customers find it through Google. In 2026 so far, Google was the biggest single source of bookings, at just under half (48.6%). So anything that weakens how it shows up in search costs real bookings.
We compared it against 12 other local hire firms on six things: search visibility, reviews, range, booking experience, offers and SEO content.
- Search visibility was the strong point. It showed in the top 5 for 13 of 17 local searches, more than any competitor. (These checks used a web-search tool with its own index, not live Google, and couldn’t see the map pack, so treat them as a rough guide.)
- Overall, it came 3rd out of 13 (37 out of 60), behind two competitors with better websites and booking.
- Booking experience was the weak point (4 out of 10), mostly because of the technical problems below.
- Gaps: it didn’t appear in the top 5 for Redditch, Walsall or Studley at all.
What the audit found
1. 19 town pages were telling Google to ignore them
Each page can carry a “canonical tag” that tells Google which address is the real version of the page. On 19 of the newer town pages (Wolverhampton, Walsall, Dudley, Solihull and others), that tag pointed to an address that just redirects to the homepage. In effect, it was telling Google not to index pages that had been written specifically to win those towns.
2. 95 broken internal links
95 different links on live pages led to pages that no longer exist, so visitors were bounced back to the homepage. They included the homepage’s own category tiles and “areas we cover” links, plus a misspelt “Contact Us” link on the product pages.
3. A 17 MB homepage
The homepage weighed 17.2 MB. On a simulated mobile connection, Google’s Lighthouse test scored it 36 out of 100 for performance, with the main image taking 9.2 seconds to appear and the layout jumping around as it loaded (layout-shift score 0.66; under 0.1 is good). Most of the weight came from eight large PNG images of 1–2.9 MB each.
4. Titles, headings and leftovers
- 23 of the 38 main category pages had no main heading (H1).
- Many page titles were very short, or had a phone number where the town name should be.
- Unfilled template text like
[CATEGORY1]and[PAGE1]was showing on live pages.
5. Claims that didn’t quite match
- The homepage said “Free Delivery”, but the delivery table charges outside the core postcodes.
- Payment wording varied from page to page.
Small things, but customers notice, and they chip away at trust.
The plan
In priority order. Most of these are quick technical fixes, not big spending.
- Fix the canonical tags on the 19 town pages so each one points to itself. This is probably the biggest single ranking win.
- Fix the 95 broken links: point the homepage tiles, area links and “Contact Us” link to the right live pages, and remove the template leftovers.
- Cut the homepage weight: convert the big images to WebP at the size they’re shown and set their dimensions. Target: under 3 MB and a layout-shift score under 0.1.
- Rewrite titles and headings on the category pages to a simple pattern: what it is + the area + the business name.
- Make every claim match reality: for example, “Free delivery in B29–B32, B38, B45, B47 and B48” instead of a blanket “Free Delivery”.
- Fill the gaps: a proper Redditch page and regular Google profile posts about the areas it’s missing from.
- Get more genuine Google reviews: a review link sent by text after every hire, and a reply to every review.
Results
[Placeholder: do not fill until the fixes have been live for at least 6–8 weeks.]
| Measure | Before (date) | After (date) |
|---|---|---|
| Town pages that can be indexed | 19 blocked (25 Sep 2026) | [ ] |
| Broken internal links | 95 (25 Sep 2026) | [ ] |
| Homepage size | 17.2 MB (25 Sep 2026) | [ ] |
| Lighthouse mobile performance | 36 (25 Sep 2026) | [ ] |
| Google profile views (month) | [ ] | [ ] |
| Calls from the Google profile (month) | [ ] | [ ] |
| Website enquiries (month) | [ ] | [ ] |
| Position for “bouncy castle hire Birmingham” (checked the same way) | #2 (approximate, 25 Sep 2026) | [ ] |
If a number doesn’t move, it’ll still go here, along with what we learnt.
What this means for your business
Most small business websites have at least one of these problems, and nobody notices because the site “looks fine”. The free one-page check looks for the same things on your Google profile and website, in plain English, on one sheet.