Tucson SEO Case Studies
Three small service businesses. One consultant doing all of the work. Here is what happened to their phones, their payroll and their revenue.
I have worked in search since 1990 and have run my own local SEO practice since 2007. These Tucson SEO case studies are the three client stories I get asked about most. In every one of them I did the work myself: the site build, the copy, the schema, the technical cleanup, the Google Business Profile and the reviews. Nothing was handed to a junior and nothing was sent offshore.
One thing to get out of the way first. I ran Temecula SEO in Southern California from 2007 until June 2022, when I moved to Tucson and became Tucson SEO. All three of the businesses below were clients from those years. I could have swapped the city names and nobody would have been the wiser. I would rather you knew. An electrician in Marana and an electrician in Murrieta are fighting for the same three map pack slots, against the same kind of competitor, using the same set of tools.
R&R Plumbing: one truck to 21 trucks
1,400%
Revenue increase reported by the owner over the life of the engagement
When Ryan Roch called me, R&R Plumbing was one truck, one phone and a website that ranked for the company name and for nothing else. Every job came from a referral or from a lead he had to buy. That is a ceiling, not a business.
We started with the unglamorous part. A site that loaded fast on a phone, one page for every service he actually sold, and one page for every town he was willing to send a truck to. Then the Google Business Profile, then the schema so Google understood what he did and where he did it.
Then the reviews, which is the part most owners quit on. Ryan did not. R&R went from just over 100 Google reviews to 4,980 over ten years, and Ryan or his people answered every single one of them. Across all platforms they are now past 8,000 five-star reviews. There is no shortcut that does that. It is a phone call after every job, every day, for a decade.
After that the growth was mechanical. More searches found him, more calls came in, and every time the call volume outran the trucks he owned he bought another truck and hired a plumber to run it. One became three. Three became eight. He finished with 21 trucks on the road and revenue up 1,400 percent from where it started. His marketing budget barely moved. The money went into equipment and payroll instead.
Ryan is the client I hold everyone else up against. He implemented every recommendation I made, and he did it the week I made it.
The electrician who quit buying leads
$3,000
Monthly ad spend replaced by organic search, in about three years
Beau was a one-man electrical shop paying roughly three thousand dollars a month to keep his phone ringing. The second he turned the ads off, the work stopped. He was renting his customers.
Paid search is a fine tool, but it is a terrible foundation. We built him one for every job he wanted more of, wrote like an electrician instead of like a marketer, and cleaned up the technical mess that was keeping half of his pages out of the index. Then we went after the searches his competitors were too lazy to write about.
The ad budget came down as the organic calls came up, and eventually it went to zero. That three thousand dollars a month became payroll. He hired his first employee, then a second, then a third. Three years after we started he was a four-man shop that owned its own lead flow.
“We used to spend $3,000 a month on ads just to keep the phone ringing. Now the phone rings on its own.”BeauElectrical contractor
One city, then the whole service area
4
New technicians hired to keep up with the calls
Platinum Air was a heating and air conditioning company that ranked well in exactly one city, the one the office sat in. Every surrounding town was owned by somebody else. Their trucks were driving past work they could not see.
Nobody ranks in a town on hope. We built a real page for each town they served, with the equipment they install, the neighborhoods they work in and the crews who go there. Not one template with the city name swapped out, which Google has been ignoring for a decade. Then the Google Business Profile, the service area settings and the review flow to match.
The towns came online one at a time over about three years. Each one added a few jobs a week, and a few jobs a week adds up to a technician. They hired four.
“We hired David hoping to get more calls. We ended up hiring four more guys to handle them.”Platinum AirHeating and air conditioning
What the three have in common
None of these were big companies with big budgets. Every one of them was an owner-operator with a truck, a phone and a website somebody had built badly. Here is what actually moved the needle in all three:
- A site that was fast, indexable and built to be understood by a search engine. That is technical SEO, and it is where I start every engagement.
- One page per service and one page per town, each written by someone who understood the trade. That is content creation, and it is the slowest and most valuable part of the job.
- A Google Business Profile that was complete, categorized correctly and fed a steady stream of new reviews. That is local SEO.
- A steady review flow instead of a panic every time somebody left a bad one, and an answer written to every review that came in. R&R Plumbing built 4,980 Google reviews that way. That is reputation management.
- An owner who stayed longer than a year. None of these results happened in a quarter, and I would not trust anyone who told you they could.
If you want to know where your own site stands before you spend a dollar, start with an SEO audit. If the site itself is the problem, I also handle website design.
What other clients say
“Dave does much more than just SEO, or at least he does everything even tangentially related to SEO. Not just finding keywords and maximizing them, but rather looking at things at their foundation so we get the best possible results. Dave is very hands-on and blazingly fast with execution. He manages to explain complex topics at a for dummies level but without making me feel like an idiot.”
“With a lot of people our company works with, we are ready for their services before they are. This is especially true of some of our previous marketing efforts. With Dave, on the other hand, we can't keep up. And our results have improved dramatically very quickly.”
Marc Rowen Estate planning attorney, Ironclad Living Trust
“David is a perfectionist when it comes to his clients. He often works through the night when a client's site has a problem. He treats his clients and their business as if it were his own business. A real professional.”
Vivian Schadler Cosmetic physicianQuestions About These SEO Results
Are these Tucson businesses?
Most of them are not, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I ran Temecula SEO in Southern California from 2007 until June 2022, when I moved to Tucson. The three companies on this page were clients during those years. The work is identical. A local service business competing in a local map pack is the same problem in Marana as it is in Murrieta.
How do you verify a number like 1,400% revenue growth?
That percentage came from the owner, not from me. I can see traffic, rankings, impressions, calls and form fills. I cannot see anyone's invoices. When Ryan Roch tells me R&R Plumbing is up fourteen hundred percent, that is his number out of his own books. What I can put in front of you directly is analytics, Search Console data and call volume, and that is exactly what goes in your monthly report.
Can I speak with one of your clients before I hire you?
Yes. Call me at (520) 207-6000 and I will connect you with someone whose business is close enough to yours to be worth your time. I ask the client first. I do not hand out phone numbers cold.
Do you have a case study in my industry?
Possibly not, and it matters less than you would think. Plumbing, electrical, heating and air, dental, estate planning, all of them come down to the same thing: does Google understand what you sell and where you sell it, and does it trust you more than the shop down the street. I would rather spend an hour looking at your market than show you a case study from a business that is nothing like yours.
Will my business grow the way these did?
I do not know, and anyone who tells you they do is guessing. Three things decide it. How crowded your market is. How good your business is at answering the phone and closing the work once the calls arrive. And how long you stay with it. Every company on this page stayed more than three years, and every one of them answered the phone.
Why are there no ranking screenshots on this page?
Because a screenshot is the easiest thing in this industry to fake, and ranking number one for a phrase nobody searches is worth nothing to you. I would rather show you what the owners said in their own words. If you want to see live data, call me and I will share my screen and walk you through a current client's Search Console.
Want to be the fourth story on this page?
I take on a small number of clients so that I can do the work myself. It is $1,000 a month, month to month, and there is no contract to sign. If it is not working you stop paying me.
Call or text me directly at (520) 207-6000, or see what the $1,000 covers and who you would actually be working with.