Case Studies · Home Services

Replacing marketplace dependency with owned channels

Home-service operators are often trapped paying marketplaces for leads they could be generating directly. This is the unwinding.

The situation

A multi-location home-services operator across several Florida markets. Roughly 80% of their lead flow was coming through third-party marketplaces — Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack. The leads were expensive, the close rates were poor, and the operator had no audience of their own. If a marketplace changed its algorithm or pricing, the business had no buffer.

I know this problem intimately. I ran a service business myself for six years before starting Revive. Paying for leads you don't own is the first real trap in home services.

The plan

The thesis was simple: every lead the client's competitor in each market got from Google or Google Business Profile was a lead our client wasn't getting. Replace the marketplace layer with an owned layer across three parallel channels: local SEO, Google Ads, and reputation.

1. Google Business Profile — all locations

Every location had a GBP. Half of them were unoptimized. We rewrote category lists, added services per location, uploaded photos with location-specific alt data, scheduled weekly GBP posts, and set up a review-request flow triggered from the CRM at job completion.

2. Local SEO (per location)

Built service-area pages for each location × service combination. Not thin content — real pages with local photos, testimonials from actual jobs in that service area, and FAQ sections that addressed the specific objections people search for in each market.

3. Google Ads

Per-location paid search targeting only the highest-intent service terms. Negative keyword lists an inch thick. Bid adjustments by time of day and day of week based on actual conversion data, not "best practices."

4. Reputation loop

Automated review request at job close. Humans responded to every review (positive and negative) within 24 hours. Negative reviews were the priority — how you handle a bad review is often what a prospect actually reads.

5. CRM + tracking (RYZE)

Unified lead intake from all sources into a single CRM so the marketplace-vs-owned comparison was real, not a guess. Closed-loop tracking so we knew which channel drove which booked job.

Outcome

Over the engagement, the ratio reversed. Owned channels (SEO, GBP, paid search) became the majority of lead flow. Marketplace spend scaled down as owned scaled up. CAC on owned channels settled well below the effective cost-per-booked-job from marketplaces. The business became durable in a way it hadn't been.

Why this matters

Service businesses are the last major category where being on the right side of local search is a moat. Not every home-services operator will beat the marketplaces — but the ones who commit to the owned layer for 12-18 months tend to permanently restructure their lead economics.

Running a multi-location service business and tired of Angi/HomeAdvisor? Book with Revive. We do this work specifically.