TheFinalCode.com manages the marketing for Primary Pool Services, a Southern California pool company with great service and very little visibility online. Two years ago Dillan ran roughly 40 pools on a service route. Today it is more than 200, and a fleet runs them. We fixed that in two legs: first a foundation of city and service pages across the county, then a video push layered on top. The foundation alone grew Primary's business by more than 25%, and today they turn up everywhere a customer thinks to look.
Primary Pool Services takes care of pools all over Southern California: monthly cleaning, equipment repairs, acid washing, and salt system maintenance. They cover Thousand Oaks, Camarillo, Westlake Village, Agoura Hills, Newbury Park, and Simi Valley. Their customers adore them. The owner and the crew care, they send photos after every visit, and they answer the phone when something breaks at seven on a Saturday. Once people switch to Primary, they stay.
Primary is run by Dillan, who never planned to stay small. He came in with serious ambition: to expand, build a fleet, and serve more than one city. He was also smart enough to know he could not run the business and chase every keyword and ad himself, so he hired us, and then did the part most owners skip. He leaned in. He stayed involved, worked side by side with the team, and kept at it month after month.
Dillan is special, and that is exactly the point. He leaned in.
When someone in Camarillo searched "pool service near me," Primary did not pull up. The deeper problem was the sheer number of targets. Primary is not a pool cleaning guy in one town. He serves the whole county, and he offers many ways to service a pool: cleaning, equipment repair, pumps, acid washing, salt and desalination systems, leak detection, spa work. Every one of those services, in every one of those cities, is a separate term a customer might type, and there are dozens of ways they phrase each one.
When he came to us he had 11 keywords, and every one of them was built on his own business name. On Google he did not exist. Not for his own name, which was fine, but for the hundreds of search terms people type every day looking for exactly what he does.
People run about 8.5 billion searches a day, and they look for the same thing a dozen different ways depending on how they talk. Every one of those phrasings is a door somebody walks through. Dillan was standing at one of them.
Twelve. That is how many visits Google sent his website in a whole month.
Year one was the foundation, and the foundation is the unglamorous part: laying the groundwork to become relevant for literally hundreds of search terms. Primary needed presence everywhere his customers were searching, service by service and city by city. Location, location, location: online, that means showing up in every place someone might look for him.
That first leg was daunting. When you stare up at the number of terms you are not relevant to, it is easy to think you will never get there. The only way is to start, and every thousand-mile journey begins with a single step. Because we sat with him, worked with his budget, and rolled him out in a plan he could afford, it is behind him now, and his job is to maintain it.
Google's ad tools, especially YouTube and Performance Max (PMax), reward video. So once we had all the pages and profiles built to carry content, we layered video on top and pushed it out through SEO, paid search, and social.
Primary had recently rebranded, and they had a mascot. We animated it, gave it a personality, and put it to work talking about the pool service. Then we kept the videos coming (a Father's Day video, a Fourth of July video) so Primary stays in the feeds of past customers as well as new ones.
The consumer attention span has changed forever. Short, bite-sized video is now the most effective way to reach people: feed them information in a format they can consume quickly and they consume more of it.
After the videos went live, engagement and time on site tripled, and the next month, Google Ads calls were up 300%.
Somebody just typed it. Either you are standing there or your competitor is. Most owners have never seen the list of terms they are missing, which is why we will run you a free visibility report. Here is what is in it:
We move them organically, not with paid ads. For what you throw away on pay-per-click in a day or two, you could own an organic page for a single term that keeps working for years. Buy the ad instead and the moment your money stops, you are off the internet.
You show up. You do good work. Your customers trust you. But when someone searches for what you do, your competitors are the ones standing there. The difference is visibility: they show up in more places, for more of the terms people type, which online amounts to the same thing as being better.
Dillan had 11 keywords, all his own name, and about 12 visits a month. Great service, terrible visibility. We built the foundation first, a page for every city and every service, and his business grew more than 25%. Then we added video, and his calls, his traffic, and his rankings all followed.
This is not for the timid or the faint-hearted. A seven-figure pool company never is. You have to fight past the noise, climb into the top three where buyers look first, and stay vigilant month after month. Dillan did, because he had the right plan, the right team, and the right attitude, and he leaned in the whole way.
Are you going to be a pool guy, or THE pool company (in your area)?
TheFinalCode