clickpuls.com – Agency website ranking #1 across DACH

For an agency, the own website is the work sample. Every first click is an implicit „can you actually do this?" — in a keyword landscape (Shopify agency Vienna, e-commerce consulting, WooCommerce support, WordPress maintenance, AI consulting DACH) where established in-house teams and big agencies have been entrenched for years.

The brief was correspondingly multi-dimensional — tech, SEO and brand building at the same time:

• Get to #1 across DACH on many commercial keywords in a short time — without years of backlink history and without a marketing budget at agency scale
• Show up in the AI-citation era: not only in Google, but as a DACH reference in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude answers
• Scale bilingually on de-AT and en-AT — with clean hreflang alternates, localised URL slugs and real dual-locale content instead of mere translation
• The architecture has to reflect what we preach: no WordPress plugin monolith, no page-builder templates, no hosted shortcuts like Wix or Webflow — real engineering instead
• Content has to stay maintainable for a small team — without CMS overhead, but with editorial cadence across services, local pages, blog, case studies and glossary
• The site has to create brand recall — not just convert, but be recognisable

Under one hard constraint: all of it happens alongside day-to-day client work. No carved-out brand phase, no redesign sabbatical — we keep shipping client projects while the own website grows.

The stack decision: Next.js 16 (App Router) + React + TypeScript + Tailwind CSS v4. Deliberately no WordPress, no Wix, no Webflow. Instead, a fully code-checked-in site where every content change runs through code review — with diff, rollback and CI checks, like any other engineering discipline.

Content-as-code: case studies, client logos, services, team bios and articles live as /data/*.tsx modules, JSX-capable and versioned in Git. No CMS admin to maintain, no plugin updates, no database migration when we rewrite a paragraph. Content work and feature work share the same process.

SEO and AI-citation architecture: full JSON-LD schema (Organization, LocalBusiness, Breadcrumb, BlogPosting, Service, CollectionPage, Person with credentials), localised URL slugs per locale (`/kunden` vs. `/clients`, `/leistungen` vs. `/services`), hreflang alternates, dynamic sitemaps, answer-first content structure. Custom `GlossaryLink` and `ArticleLink` components keep internal linking scalable — every new article picks up crossovers automatically.

Internationalisation with next-intl: de-AT and en-AT as first-class locales, locale-aware routing, separate keyword strategies per language. No 1:1 translation, but real dual-locale substance — with dedicated metadata, OG images and crosslinks for each.

Branding and brand recall: the PulseRow ECG animation as the visual brand device, a consistent colour system (`paper` / `paper-2` / `ink`), display font with `italic-serif` accents. Not interchangeable — the site stays recognisable even in a screenshot.

Hosting on Fly.io: Docker-based deploy, multi-region edge, no platform-lock-in issues. Builds run in minutes, rollback is a Git revert. No shared WordPress host playing roulette with every plugin update.

Editorial engine: service pages, local pages, blog, glossary and case studies run as an integrated editorial pipeline. Every new piece of content links internally, gets lifted into schema, picks up OG tags and hreflang alternates automatically — instead of being maintained manually per page.