Optimise Online and The Grout Guy are finalists in the Global Digital Excellence Awards 2026, in the Standout B2C Website of the Year category. The shortlisted website was built for one practical job: helping people across five Australian states find the right local service quickly.
The official 2026 shortlist places us in the category alongside AS Watson & The Perfume Shop, and Reffine & MG Motor Middle East. Winners are due to be announced on Thursday 22 October 2026 at 11am BST, which is 6pm in Perth. Until then, we are finalists. It is good company to be in.
The job the website had to do
The Grout Guy restores tiles and grout in Western Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, ACT and Queensland. Someone with a failing shower in one suburb is asking a local question. One national message can only answer it in general terms.
Brad Young founded The Grout Guy in Perth. At the time of our entry, it had more than 150 staff across eight cities and serviced more than 2,500 suburbs. Its customers are mostly homeowners, and they search the way they talk: a leaking shower in Joondalup, regrouting in Dandenong. Every page answers their three real worries. The tiles are not removed, the quoted price is the price paid, and every full shower regrout carries a ten-year waterproof warranty.
So we built the website in layers. State, then city, then suburb. A separate services cluster sits beside those location pages, and the two are linked so a visitor can move between the service they need and the place they need it. Paid search followed suit. Each state has its own Google Ads account, which means WA, VIC, NSW, SA and QLD can be managed and measured as five separate markets.
How 2,535 local pages were built
Our team of twelve delivered the brand, content, design and build in-house. The project ran five months against a six-month schedule, and the new site launched in full on 27 May 2026. As entered, it spans 2,615 URLs: 2,535 suburb and location pages beneath the state and city pages, plus fifteen core service and company pages.
Scale is where local SEO usually falls over. A page with a different suburb name pasted in is worthless to a reader and to Google. So we treated page production as a system, not a writing job. We encoded our own copywriting frameworks and The Grout Guy’s brand voice into a content pipeline, used AI to write distinct copy for every location, then checked the pages by hand, one state at a time. All 2,535 were produced in two weeks.
The site’s most distinctive feature is the Grout Visualiser, which we developed with The Grout Guy. A visitor uploads a photo of their own tiles, picks wall and floor grout colours, and sees a realistic preview of the finished job. People put off booking when they cannot picture the result. Now they can see it first.
The results behind it
The numbers are on the public record, in our Grout Guy case study. Cost per click fell from $9 to $1.10 in the first weeks after the paid search rebuild. Overall cost per lead, which Brad Young had reported at $140 or more, came down to below $70.
Across the five states, average Google Ads cost per lead moved from $44.54 to $29.03 over the first five months. Google Search Console impressions rose from 318,002 to 850,222 in six months, an increase of 167%. Paid search conversions grew from 9,422 to 15,094.
Our awards entry added the organic side of the story. When The Grout Guy engaged us in November 2025, it discontinued a programmatic advertising campaign across television and radio that had cost more than $70,000 a month, a figure Brad Young has confirmed, and that campaign had not run until just recently in September. At the time we entered, organic search was sustaining the traffic the campaign used to support.
These figures come from different parts of the work and different reporting periods. They show what happened for this client, in this market, with this starting point, and none of it is a forecast for anyone else. Brad has praised the team’s ethics and the way it has delivered results with less spend. He has also said the new site is clearly converting better.
Progress since our entry
The work has kept moving since we entered. In Google Search Console for the national site, average position is 9.9 for October to date, against 15.3 at the time of our entry. Click-through rate is now around 2.8 per cent, up from 2.4 per cent at entry. Organic clicks have held steady through the months since launch: 3,725 in May, 3,698 in June, 4,048 in July, 3,754 in August and 3,750 in September.
What the finalist place tells a prospective client
The finalist place is for the website. What it does give you is an outside check: an international awards programme looked at the website we built and put it on its shortlist. The team and I could not be prouder of that recognition.
The work itself is better evidence. If you run a local service business, look at whether a customer can find your service and their area without hunting for it. Then ask whether you can see which markets bring in enquiries. Good design should help with both.
Frequently asked questions
Which award is The Grout Guy website a finalist for?
Optimise Online and The Grout Guy are finalists for Standout B2C Website of the Year in the Global Digital Excellence Awards 2026. You can see the category on the official shortlist page linked above.
When are the winners announced?
The awards programme says winners will be announced on Thursday 22 October 2026 at 11am BST (6pm in Perth). This article announces the finalist place only. It does not report a win.
What did Optimise Online build for The Grout Guy?
We built a website with linked state, city and suburb pages, plus a separate services cluster. The wider engagement included organic search work and five separate state Google Ads accounts. The case study explains the decisions in more detail.
Can another business expect the same results?
No one should promise that. Results depend on the market, competition, budget, starting position and how the business handles enquiries. The case study shows what happened for The Grout Guy, and it is a useful reference rather than a guarantee.
See the work behind the shortlist
A finalist place is welcome. The work underneath it is what you can check. Read The Grout Guy case study to see the structure and results in full.
If your customers need to find you across several suburbs, cities or states, book a conversation with our team. How easy does your website make that local choice today?
