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Case study · SEO + Paid search · Client for 10+ years
How a national services company expanded into five new states and booked 4.2x more jobs from paid search
Our longest-running client faced tougher competition at home, new markets where nobody knew its name, and no way to connect ad clicks to booked jobs. Here's how SEO and paid search, planned together, solved all three.
The challenge
Three problems, one growth plan
A crowded home market
Competition kept rising across the company's established home region, and brand searches alone couldn't sustain growth.
Five new states, zero awareness
Expansion meant launching where nobody was searching for the brand yet, so every new customer had to come from non-brand searches.
Calls the ads couldn't see
Many customers book by phone, but there was no way to tie a call from a paid ad to a booked job.
Our approach
THE STRATEGY
SEO wins the research phase, paid search wins the moment someone is ready to book, and every booking is measured, so new markets grow profitably instead of just costing more.
SEO
Own the non-brand search
- City pages built to rank for high-volume, high-intent searches like "services in [city]" and "[service] companies near me."
- Content for every stage of the customer journey: how-to guides, cost questions, local city guides and route pages that grew the long-distance footprint.
- One topic plan for SEO and paid search, so organic content reached people early and ads were there when they were ready to book.
Paid search
Scale only what books jobs
- Every market split into a dedicated Brand campaign and a dedicated Performance Max prospecting campaign, so each channel was judged on its own.
- Call tracking added alongside web-form tracking, so call-driven and web-driven bookings rolled up into one revenue view.
- Monthly reviews of spend, cost per lead and cost per booked job by market, with budget moved toward markets with proven economics.
- Spend scaled about 4x in deliberate steps, adding budget only where the return justified it.
The results
Spend scaled. Efficiency held.
Over 12 months, monthly ad spend grew 3.9x while booked jobs grew 4.2x. Lead volume nearly quadrupled, and the cost of each booked job actually came down.
Monthly ad spend vs. booked jobs
Organic search: average rank from #32 to #10
Average Google position, all searches
We've partnered with Simple Search for many years. They are smart, responsive, and have been instrumental in driving leads through organic and paid search as well as paid social. I highly recommend Mary and her team.
Local services marketing
Grow into new markets, profitably
We help service companies win the searches that turn into booked jobs, in their home markets and everywhere they expand, across Google and AI search.
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