Page 4 → Page 1 for “whitewater engineering”
+65%more searches ranking on Google’s first page, year over year
6.6xmore Google visibility for whitewater searches, year over year
OVERVIEW
Calibre Engineering is a Highlands Ranch, Colorado firm delivering structural, civil, and water resources engineering for municipal, federal, commercial, and residential projects. When Calibre united with S2O Design – a specialist in whitewater parks, river engineering, and swiftwater rescue facilities – it needed a website that could tell both stories at once.
Relish led the strategy, design, and development of a new WordPress site, migrated from Squarespace, that positions Calibre as a trusted partner for complex projects and a great place for engineers to build a career.
CHALLENGES
Engineering is complicated, and most engineering websites prove it. Calibre needed a site that made technical services easy to understand for the people hiring them – municipal project managers, developers, architects, and federal procurement teams – without losing the precision the firm is known for.
Two moving parts raised the stakes:
- A platform migration. Moving from Squarespace to WordPress gave Calibre room to grow, but a replatform is where search rankings go to die if nobody’s watching. We had to carry years of SEO equity across intact.
- A business union. S2O brought a respected name in whitewater park design, its own culture, and hard-won search visibility in a niche market. All of it needed a home on Calibre’s site without getting lost in the shuffle.
SOLUTION
As with every Relish project, we started with strategy. Through our Strategy FIRST process, we built audience personas, assessed Calibre’s market and baseline search performance, and mapped a plan for bringing S2O into the fold – plus a marketing roadmap for the year ahead.
That work produced a full site reorganization: which content was earning its keep, what should be retired, and how to structure the site so Calibre’s internal team could manage it without calling us for every update (though we do love hearing from them).
Then we designed and built it:
- Clear service architecture. Dedicated pages for civil, structural, construction phase services, water resources, municipal, and federal work, each written so a non-engineer can follow along.
- A real home for S2O’s expertise. Whitewater & River Engineering and Swiftwater Rescue became full service lines, backed by portfolio pages for projects like the Boise Whitewater Park and the U.S. National Whitewater Center.
- Culture and careers up front. Calibre competes for engineering talent as hard as it competes for projects, so the site sells the team as well as the work.
- An SEO-safe migration. Redirect mapping, page-level metadata, and structured data carried Calibre’s search history over to the new platform instead of starting from zero.
RESULTS
Within months of launch, the numbers showed the strategy working. Comparing June through early October 2026 with the same period in 2025:
- Calibre now ranks on Google’s first page for 383 searches, up from 232 – a 65% jump.
- For “whitewater engineering,” the niche’s biggest search, Calibre climbed from an average position of 37 (page 4) to 8.6 (page 1).
- Whitewater searches overall earned 6.6× more impressions, and Calibre now ranks in the top 3 for “what engineering firms specialize in whitewater course design?” – exactly the kind of question people now ask Google and AI assistants alike.
- Core civil searches moved too. “Civil engineers near me” climbed from #15 to #6, with 20× more impressions.
All of that came through a platform migration and a business union, the two moments most likely to send search rankings sideways.
Source: Google Search Console, Jun 6–Oct 4, 2026 vs. Jun 6–Oct 4, 2025.
For another technical company that needed its expertise explained in plain English, see Nano Fixation.
