Exterior Renovations

Exterior Renovations is an exterior-remodeling contractor in the Madison, Wisconsin area — roofing, siding, windows, doors, and decks. A regional operator competing for high-intent local search against bigger names and the lead-aggregation platforms that sit between contractors and homeowners.

The challenge

Local home-services demand is won or lost in two places: the top of Google's results and the cost of a qualified lead. Exterior Renovations had the craftsmanship and the reputation, but limited organic visibility and a paid program that needed to run more efficiently — in a seasonal market where searches spike for a few months and every lead has to count.

The strategy

We ran paid search and SEO as one coordinated program, not two line items. On paid, we concentrated budget on the highest-intent campaigns — siding chief among them — and tuned relentlessly for efficiency, pushing search-impression share up and cost per lead down. On organic, we shipped batches of genuinely useful content — service and project guides written to answer the questions buyers and AI search engines actually ask — alongside the technical fixes that let that content rank. Everything was measured against a clear baseline and iterated month over month.

The results

In a recent five-week stretch the program generated 36 leads at about $61 each — roughly one a day, at the lowest cost per lead of the year. The siding campaign ran at around $42 a lead while capturing nearly 80% of available search impressions, where a strong program usually targets 30%.

Organic traffic nearly doubled — from about 350 daily visits in late April to around 700 within two months of the new content going live. Average keyword position improved roughly threefold year over year, from about 29 to around 10, and the site went from ranking for about 50 keywords to roughly 200 — with nearly 100 of them in the top three results. Four of six new guides reached the top eight results for their target terms within weeks; one climbed from the third page to position five in a single week. The program is even earning AI-search citations, surfacing across about 20 query types in Google's AI results.

Asked how business was going, the owner's answer was short: “that's an understatement.”