A local plumbing contractor, from losing ground to leading the market
Home services. Residential and emergency plumbing.
Losing ground in their own backyard
A family-owned plumbing contractor came to us losing ground in their own backyard. The phone was ringing less than it had the year before, and nobody could say why.
Their Google Business Profile is the single largest source of calls for any local home services business, and it was in decline. Within months that decline had deepened to −69%. The website was not helping: 59 pages running uncompressed and unminified, 59 images with no alt attribute, and 37 pages with no meta description. On the searches that matter most, the words a customer types when a pipe bursts, they ranked in the fifties, sixties and nineties. In practical terms, invisible.
The deeper problem: nobody could see any of it. Form submissions were not captured. Calls were not attributed to a source. The owner knew business was softer than last year, but had no way to know which channel was failing, or whether anything he was paying for was working. Partway through, the profile was suspended over an uploaded image and had to be reinstated before any of it could be measured.
Top of the map where it pays
First place on their highest-intent emergency and repair searches, and full share of local voice on their core city term. Average ranking position improved ten places after the rebuild.
Engaged organic sessions were up 94% year to date while the old site was still live. The rebuild built on a recovery that was already under way.
Profile calls now run above the peak the business was hitting before the decline began, and a rebuilt site added around fifteen qualified form leads a month through a path that previously had no tracking at all. Every figure is organic and local search, measured separately from paid, which was wound down during the engagement.
Five moves, in the order they happened
Built the measurement layer first
Reporting and call attribution stood up in the opening weeks, so we knew what normal looked like before changing anything, and could show the client which channel every lead came from.
Recovered the local presence
Profile reclaimed and rebuilt: categories, hours, service areas, photography, posting cadence and a sustained review push. Local was treated as the primary revenue channel, not a checkbox.
Cleaned the technical foundation
Compression, indexation, metadata, schema, internal linking and a backlink disavow. The unglamorous work that lets everything else rank.
Rebuilt the website at the right moment
A rebuild is a real investment, so we kept improving what was there and let the reporting make the case. The money went in with evidence behind it, and the new site launched with working lead capture from day one.
Made the case against paid search
Paid search put them in the same auction as national brands with budgets no local contractor can match. We tested it on and off through the engagement, and each time the spend bought clicks, not customers. Our recommendation was to move that budget into work that captures leads.
Where they started, where they are
| Measure | At the start | Today |
|---|---|---|
| Qualified leads per month | 157 | 270 |
| Profile calls, year over year | −54% | +148% |
| Profile website clicks, year over year | −41% | +114% |
| Map impressions, year over year | — | +250% |
| Search visibility vs local competitors | Behind the leader | Market leader |
In one line: a local contractor came to us down 54% year over year, with no analytics and no lead tracking. Today they lead their market, take 270 qualified leads a month, and pay nothing for traffic.