ShepherdUX

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ShepherdUX

● A note from the builder

Still being built.

A hand-drawn studio site, growing as you read - new worlds and new entries land week by week, rough edges and all. If something looks unfinished, it probably is.

Get in touch

    01 Luxury ground transport · Orlando

    Orlux Rides

    The carriage yard

    A chauffeured fleet running Orlando airports, theme parks and cruise terminals. A year of full-stack search work took the site from fourteen impressions a day to nearly five thousand - 998,307 in its first twelve months - with a purpose-built CRM underneath to catch what the content brings in.

    The brief

    Orlando has hundreds of chauffeur operators and they all show the same black SUV against the same skyline. Almost none of them will tell you what a ride costs.

    So the site is built the other way round. The rate is stated before the promise is made, and the fleet is described in the words a traveller actually books in - airport, park, cruise, hourly - rather than in the words a fleet manager owns it in. Then the content programme goes and answers the questions those travellers ask.

    The work

    1. 01 One template, seventeen blocks Every vehicle page and every service page is assembled from the same ordered sequence. Writing a new page becomes a decision about content rather than a decision about layout, which is the only way a page count grows without the site coming apart.
    2. 02 A content programme with a constitution One hundred and eighty-seven posts in ten topical hubs - deliberately cut down from two hundred and fifty-eight, because two posts on one intent split each other. Every draft is written to a framework that rotates ten narrative shapes and thirteen hooks, and passes an automated gate before it ships.
    3. 03 Search results, measured in the open From position 75 to page one in a year: 4,464 clicks and 998,307 impressions, most of them on non-branded cruise and theme-park searches the blog was built to own. Roughly one booking in twelve now arrives through an AI assistant rather than a search results page, because every post is written to be quoted in isolation.
    4. 04 A CRM of its own A white-labelled subscription was replaced with a custom-built CRM: calls, texts and email on one number, invoicing and payments, and a speed-to-lead automation that enrols a new booking the second it lands. Live at crm.orluxrides.com.
    5. 05 And the rest of the yard The six-step booking form on the homepage, a trip manager with a customer portal and an operator app for ride day, press syndicated out to Associated Press and Business Insider, Google Ads, and a post-ride SMS review system. One vendor, one yard.

    The first year on search

    Cumulative Google Search Console impressions, from launch in August 2025 to 26 August 2026. From nothing to 998,307 - and from position 75 to page one. Point at any month for its own numbers.

    Clusters land

    Point at any part of it.

    One page, seventeen blocks

    The template every vehicle and service page is assembled from. Four phases, in order, every time.

    Point at any part of it.

    Built with

    • WordPress
    • Content system
    • Technical SEO
    • Custom CRM

    02 Water treatment · Tampa Bay

    ClearQuest Water

    The sebil

    Filtration and reverse osmosis for Tampa Bay homes, sold the way the client insists: facts, not fear. When this work began the site was commercially invisible - virtually every click Google could attribute was the brand name. A quarter later it draws five hundred impressions a day, and climbing.

    The brief

    Nobody searches for reverse osmosis for fun. They search for it an hour after reading something frightening about their own tap water, and an anxious search wants an answer rather than a catalogue.

    The audit found the real problem before any writing started: twenty-five of the site’s most important pages - every city page, the conversion page itself - had never been crawled by Google at all. Content cannot rank from pages a crawler has never seen, so the plumbing was fixed first, and then the answers were written.

    The work

    1. 01 The audit came first A Search Console autopsy: seven pages indexed, twenty-five money pages never crawled, junk URLs outranking the pages that earn. The fix list ran from a cleaned sitemap and rebuilt canonicals to ten city pages whose schema each declared an invented business.
    2. 02 Pillar and cluster, held together Thirty-four posts across nine clusters, each cluster owned by one worry - hardness, iron and sulfur, taste, the lab test a loan closing depends on - and every route through them ends at the free water test. A sebil hands the first cup over for nothing; so does this site.
    3. 03 Written for the answer engines Every post answers its question in the first sentence, spells its entities out in full, carries a liftable fact table and FAQ schema - built to be quoted by AI Overviews and assistants as much as ranked in the blue links. The format is enforced by code: twelve blocking checks run before anything publishes.
    4. 04 The lead never gets lost Two conversion landing pages for the paid work, a custom lead pipeline wired into Wix - form to contact record to dashboard notification, with an email failsafe so nothing is ever dropped - and a Google Ads plan split by water source, well against city, down to the ZIP code.

    From invisible, in one quarter

    Average Google Search Console impressions per day, by month, since tracking began in late May 2026. The engine is young; the slope is the point.

    The audit

    Point at any part of it.

    Draft to published, in seven

    The delivery format. The same seven steps every time, which is why the process can be counted at all.

    Point at any part of it.

    Built with

    • Wix
    • Pillar & cluster
    • Technical SEO

    03 Fashion retail · Pakistan

    La Soie

    The silk merchant

    A Karachi silk house on Shopify, selling hand-embroidered occasion wear to Pakistan and its diaspora. A hundred and fifty-post editorial programme, four pillar guides live on launch day - and a first quarter on search spent entirely on page one, at an average position under seven.

    The brief

    A young store cannot outrank the giants for its own products, and a hundred and fifty posts written the same way become wallpaper by the fortieth. Both problems have the same answer: own the questions the giants ignore - the fabrics, the etiquette, the fit - and never take the same shape twice running.

    So the programme rotates on two axes at once: the shape a piece takes, chosen from eight frameworks, and the reader it is written for, chosen from eight archetypes. Neither repeats twice in a row, and the pair is chosen before a word is written.

    The work

    1. 01 Heritage first, catalogue second Dupatta etiquette, jamawar, what to wear to a dholki: the guides answer what the customer is actually typing, and they rank - the dupatta guide alone sits around position five. Every piece still has a garment behind it and a route to it, because editorial that ends in admiration is a magazine somebody else is paying for.
    2. 02 Archetypes, not personas The reader is chosen as deliberately as the subject - a Karachi professional, a bride in the UK diaspora, a mother of the groom - a wardrobe and an occasion rather than an average customer, so the writing has somebody specific to be addressed to.
    3. 03 The audience the store was built for The search traffic splits the way the label sells: more clicks from the United States than from Pakistan, with the UK, India and Canada behind them. Diaspora buyers were the plan, and the first quarter of data shows them arriving.
    4. 04 The store, the pixels, the channel Six bespoke theme sections built into the Shopify storefront, the tracking stack verified end to end - Meta pixel and server-side events with zero errors, GA4, Merchant Center - and a YouTube strategy that treats the channel as an editorial film platform rather than a catalogue.

    Thirteen weeks on page one

    Weekly Google Search Console impressions, 25 May to 23 August 2026. Average position across the whole run: 6.75 - page one from the first week, while impressions grew elevenfold.

    Point at any part of it.

    The eight frameworks in rotation

    The real eight, from the client’s own master framework. The shape is chosen before the subject is written; ten hooks and eight reader archetypes rotate with it.

    Point at any part of it.

    Built with

    • Shopify
    • Editorial programme
    • Brand voice

    04 Commerce · relaunch

    Pink Pakistani Salt

    The salt merchant

    A Himalayan salt store being brought back from eight months dormant. The audit is the work here: a catalogue half off-niche, a missing pixel blocking the entire paid plan, and a relaunch sequenced around both.

    The brief

    The store had been dark for eight months. The first job was not to reopen it - it was to find out what had gone wrong while it was open.

    Two things had, and both of them were structural. Half the catalogue was not salt. And the pixel every paid campaign would have to report back to had never fired, which meant there was nothing to optimise toward and no way to know it.

    The work

    1. 01 The audit came before the relaunch Reopening a store that failed once, unchanged, is a way of failing twice, more slowly. Nothing was scheduled until the catalogue and the measurement had been read cover to cover.
    2. 02 Half the catalogue was off-niche A salt store that also sells other things is not a salt store to a shopper or to a search engine. The split is the first thing the relaunch has to resolve.
    3. 03 A missing pixel blocked the whole paid plan No pixel means no conversion signal, no audience, and no optimisation - the spend would all have been buying a number nobody could read. It is fixed first, and it is why the paid work starts after the measurement rather than beside it.
    4. 04 A relaunch sequenced around both Catalogue, then measurement, then spend. In that order, because the other orders all pay for the same lesson twice.
    5. 05 Tooling built for the job The audit was run with instruments made for it - authenticated store access held across sessions, the catalogue read in full rather than sampled - and the defect list came back ranked: placeholder policy text, phantom compare-at prices on nearly every variant, tax flags off on all but two.

    Eight months dark

    The one certain fact about the store before this work: nothing shipped, nothing spent, nothing measured. Live figures replace this the moment there are any.

    Audit

    Point at any part of it.

    The catalogue, audited

    Roughly half of what the store listed was not the thing the store is for.

    Point at any part of it.

    Built with

    • Shopify
    • Store audit
    • Paid media

    05 SaaS · assisted living

    Lantern

    The lantern maker

    An AI front desk and CRM for small Florida care homes, where the decision call comes at two in the morning and mostly lands in voicemail. Lantern answers it, qualifies the family and offers the tour while they are still on the phone.

    The brief

    The decision to move a parent into care arrives at 2am, and a six-bed home in Florida is asleep - so the family rings the next number on the list, and the home never knows the call happened.

    The homes that do get enquiries mostly buy them from a referral service, at something close to a month’s rent per placement - renting back the top of their own funnel. Lantern is the argument that one vendor should own the loop instead.

    The work

    1. 01 A front desk that is awake at 2am Calls and texts answered in under a minute, around the clock, with the tour already on the calendar by the time the home sits down to breakfast. Nothing about qualifying a family requires a person to be awake.
    2. 02 A CRM built for six beds, not six hundred Small homes are run by the person who also cooks. Anything with an implementation phase does not get implemented, so the product has to be useful on the first afternoon.
    3. 03 One vendor, no joins Enquiry, tour, follow-up, placement and the record afterwards. Split across three tools it leaks at every join, and the referral service exists because of the leaks.

    The loop, closed

    The stretch a referral service currently rents out. Each step is a place a small home loses the enquiry.

    Point at any part of it.

    Built with

    • Next.js
    • Product
    • Go-to-market

    06 Publication

    Mind Stream Tribune

    The scribe’s press Under maintenance

    A publication about where technology is taking us, written for smart people who are not engineers. Forty-odd posts, schema and search set up properly, and three pillars that each earn their own audience.

    The brief

    Writing about technology divides into two piles: press releases with adjectives on them, and papers nobody outside the field can read. Between the piles is a large readership that is being served by neither.

    Mind Stream Tribune is written for that readership, across three pillars, each of which has to be able to hold an audience on its own rather than borrowing one from the other two.

    The work

    1. 01 Three pillars, each self-supporting A pillar that only works as part of a set is a category, not a pillar. Each of these is commissioned as though it were the whole publication.
    2. 02 Schema and search, set up properly Article markup, an author who exists, a structure a crawler can walk, and no invented properties - one wrong claim in structured data is enough for the rest to be discounted.
    3. 03 Forty-odd posts, and a shape for the next four hundred The archive is small. The framework it is being written into is not, which is the difference between a blog and a publication.

    Three pillars

    Each one commissioned as though it were the whole publication.

    Point at any part of it.

    Built with

    • WordPress
    • Publishing
    • Schema

    07 Coming soon

    Chronicle Park

    The antiquarian

    A journal on the human past, present and future - where we came from, what we are doing with it, and what we are walking into. The shutter is only half up on this one.

    The brief

    Three shelves: what happened, what is happening, and what is about to. The argument is that they are one subject and get written about as three.

    It is being built. There is nothing to link to yet, and a portfolio that links to an empty site is worse than one that says so.

    The work

    1. 01 Not open yet The shutter comes the rest of the way up when there is enough on the shelves to be worth the walk. If you want to know when that is, the card on the last bay of the street takes messages.

    Built with

    • In development

    08 Open ground

    Your stall here

    The eighth bay is kept swept, lit and ready. If you have a project that deserves a shop on this street - a brand, a product, a thing that needs designing and building, start to finish - this is where it would stand.

    Write the brief

    ● Selected work

    Seven shops on one street.

    Every project here is given the trade it actually is, then built as that shop. Three carry their live search numbers, from the clients’ own Google Search Console. Open any shop that interests you.

    Let's write the brief.

    My name is , and I am with .

    I am here because

    I would like to start , with a budget around .

    You can reach me at .

    Here is the shape of it: (optional)

    ● Before you write

    Asked and answered.

    What does ShepherdUX actually do?

    Design, build and growth, the whole stack: brand identity, interfaces, full websites and apps, editorial blogs, full-stack SEO, Google and Meta ads, and custom CRMs with whatever integrations the work needs. You can hire one layer on its own. The practice exists because the layers work better when one pair of hands holds all of them.

    Does the SEO cover AI search as well as Google?

    Yes, and it has for a while. Everything is written answer-first, with entities spelled out and facts a machine can lift whole, so it ranks in Google and gets quoted by AI assistants. On one client, AI assistants now deliver roughly one booking in twelve.

    What does a project cost?

    It depends on what the work is, which is why the brief above asks for a budget instead of quoting one blind. Small fixed pieces exist, and so do monthly programmes. Either way you get a written plan with a price on it before anyone commits to anything.

    Can you take over a site somebody else built?

    Yes - it is one of the most common ways in. The first step is an audit rather than a rebuild: on one recent client, the audit found Google had never crawled twenty-five of the site’s most important pages. What happens next follows from what the audit finds, not from a package.

    Where is the studio based?

    The work is remote and always has been. Current and recent clients run from Orlando and Tampa Bay to Karachi, and every one of them is measured the same way, in their own Google Search Console. Distance has never once been the problem.

    How will I know the work is working?

    You watch it move in numbers you own: Google Search Console, your analytics, your inbox. The portfolio on this site draws its graphs from clients’ real Search Console exports - that is the standard of evidence the work is held to, here and everywhere.

    Or write to hello@shepherdux.com, or send a message on WhatsApp. One person reads these, and answers most of them the same day.

    Services

    What this studio does

    Eleven kinds of work from one pair of hands, and the floor under each of them published. Pick the one you came for.

    None of these quite it? Say what you need in one sentence