In 2011 we embarked upon an organic search strategy for a local painter. This painter was a 1 man show, with 1 truck, and worked for himself for 20 years in a small town. As a client, his needs were very simple: he wanted more customers, and didn’t care how we did it. So we did what we do best. We started building links, doing outreach, building his social media properties, etc. Within a few weeks, website visitors were up, and his phone started to ring just a little bit more.
2 months later, things were going great! We didn’t knock it out of the park, but our client was very happy. His phone was ringing a lot more, and he even asked his wife to quit her part time job in order to help him manage the business.
Then one day, a very short email came in:
Dear Mr. Parker,
We would like to receive a quote on painting our exterior building. We have 3 walls that need to be painted that are roughly 30×10 each wall. Please forward us your best quote.
Sincerely,
XXX
This may have seemed like a normal lead, but it was actually the property manager from the local University, and was looking to have someone take over the contract for their school! This potentially turned into a massive client for our client, and has since changed everything in his life.
We attribute a lot of this to having great search engine visibility and a little bit of luck. We built a form into the sidebar of each page to make it easy for people to get a quote, and made the page very easy to navigate. We also made the page look like an A1 professional painter, even though he was just 1 guy. It gives us the chills when things like this happens. One never knows when that next big client is going to come about, but one thing is for sure: you want to be visible when it happens.
There are many SEO case studies that we’ve done over the years but none of them compare to this one.
