Case Study: Industrial Cleaning Services

Most service businesses hit the same ceiling eventually.

They do good work, clients are happy, referrals trickle in, but growth is mostly dependent on outbound efforts that don't scale (cold calls, working trade shows, and trying to drum up referrals).

The moment any of that slows down, their pipeline dries up and becomes unpredictable.

And that was the exact situation this client found themselves in when they came to us.

They had a very specific industry and target customer...

Industrial cleaning services for biogas plants, water treatment plants, and other industrial facilities.

That level of specificity often makes search marketing one of the best possible channels for building an inbound pipeline. It gives you the ability to reach a buyer at the exact moment they need you.

The client understood this and was already investing in Google Ads and SEO to try to capture that demand.

But the leads coming in were commercial cleaning inquiries, offices, and small businesses looking for routine cleaning services, not facility managers with industrial cleaning problems.

They were wasting a ton of money on campaigns that were attracting the wrong audience entirely, and their SEO wasn't generating any meaningful traffic at all.

That's where we came in...

We identified the issues in their strategy on both fronts and fixed them. And within 10 months, we built them a consistent inbound pipeline of qualified leads that helped them generate $348k in new proposals within 10 months.

Here's exactly what was broken and what we did about it.

The Diagnosis

When we came on board, we ran simultaneous audits of the Google Ads account and their SEO.

The issues on each side were different, but they both pointed to the same root problem:

Their digital marketing wasn't built to drive the specific buyers they wanted.

Here's what those audits uncovered:

Google Ads

Every keyword in the account was set to broad match, and every ad pointed to the homepage.

Broad match tells Google to show your ad to anyone searching for something roughly related to your keyword. So a keyword like "industrial cleaning" was triggering ads for janitorial inquiries, office cleaning searches, and residential questions. Google was spending the budget, and clicks were coming in, but the people clicking had no idea what this company actually did.

And sending that traffic to a generic homepage compounded the problem. There was no message match, no immediate signal to the visitor that they had found the right place.

That's why their lead quality was so low, and their costs were so high.

SEO

On the organic side, we discovered that almost nothing had been done.

There were no service pages targeting specific offerings, no backlinks, and no content strategy. The site existed, but from Google's perspective, there was almost no reason to rank it.

This is the most common situation we see with service businesses.

They often assume that building a website and adding some keywords is enough to show up in search.

But it's rarely enough (even in specific, low-competition industries).

Ranking in Google and LLMs requires two things working together:

1. Relevance

Your site has to clearly signal what you do and for whom.

2. Authority

Search engines & LLMs need a reason to trust your site, which comes from backlinks, brand mentions, and topical depth.

Our audit showed major gaps on both fronts, which explained why they rarely got leads from SEO.

What We Did

1. Rebuilt the Google Ads Campaigns From the Ground Up

First, we switched everything from broad match to exact match.

That gave us more control over which keywords triggered ads, so we could stop wasting budget on clicks from non-customers.

(Google often pushes everyone to stay on broad match, but in specific industries like this, that is a HUGE mistake.)

From there, we built service-specific campaigns. Each service had a specific ad campaign that pointed to a specific service landing page (rather than the homepage).

This almost instantly improved their lead quality and dropped their cost per lead.

2. Built the SEO Foundation From Scratch

We started with keyword research aimed at one specific goal: to find the exact phrases facility managers and plant operators search for when they need these services.

From there, we built dedicated service pages for each major offering. Each of them was optimized for the highest value keyword we could find.

This is a CRITICAL step most service businesses skip.

They think they can just stuff their homepage with keywords of all the services they provide. That almost never works.

Your homepage needs to target your broad category, then you need specific service pages for each specific offering you have.

Once we built their ~7 service pages and re-optimized their homepage, we started mapping out topical clusters for content.

With a specific service business like this, you need to build your "topical relevance" with Google and LLMs as fast as possible.

This is a fancy phrase that just means having those LLMs associate you with your key service.

Oftentimes, if you have a very small site (5-10 pages) with no blog posts, LLMs won't see you as an "authority" or credible source for your industry.

That's obviously a huge problem.

So, to fix this, we like to create 3-5 articles per service and link each of them back to the core service page.

This helps you:

• Rank when people are asking questions about your services
• Build relevance so LLMs see you as a credible source in your industry
• Get some passive backlinks that help build authority

Within a few months of making these changes, qualified traffic already started climbing into the 100s of unique sessions from SEO per month, and leads started coming in.

3. Ongoing Optimization on Both Channels

As with anything in business, you can't just "set it and forget it". You have to keep testing, creating new content, and building authority for your marketing to keep working.

We always build that into our ongoing processes.

On the ads side for this client, that meant testing new keyword variations, refining ad copy, building out an aggressive negative keyword list, and running landing page tests to improve conversion rates.

We largely ignored Google's automated recommendations because the default advice of using broad match would destroy all the gains we made.

On the SEO side, we published content consistently to expand topical authority, continued building backlinks to grow domain trust, and tracked rankings closely to double down on whatever was gaining ground.

The Results

I'm really happy with the progress made so far. What you are doing is definitely increasing quality conversions. - Founder & President

After 10 months:

• Monthly qualified leads were up 47.3%, generating $348,417.64 in new proposal value
• Google Ads lead volume increased 40.24% while cost per lead dropped 9.39%.
• Organic search traffic increased by 264.95%, and organic leads increased 342.86%

Ready to See Results Like This?

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Click here to book yours today.