Case study · 90-day engagement
A Tampa collision shop with 22 years on the State Farm DRP list was watching their referrals decline every quarter. Adjusters were quietly steering customers to two newer competitors with photo-rich GBP listings and faster claim flows. The owner thought the DRP relationship would always carry the shop. It would not.
The challenge
The owner came in through our free audit. The bot scored the website at 54 and flagged thin GBP photos and a non-existent insurance landing page as the top two issues. Two competitors in Tampa had figured out something our client had not: adjusters now check GBP photos and Google reviews before recommending a shop, not just the DRP list.
We pulled the data. The damage:
The owner was paying nothing for a marketing agency. The shop had been coasting on a relationship he assumed was unbreakable. The first three weeks of changes shifted his referral count up by 40%. By week 12 it had tripled.
The plan
We sent the shop manager a photo schedule: 6 photos a day for 30 days. Before-and-after pairs of every job, frame straightening, paint matching close-ups. Each photo got a caption with the make/model and the type of damage. By week 4 the GBP had 180 new photos, up from 14. Adjusters who searched the shop name now saw a full visual portfolio.
We built a single page at /insurance-claims with a phone number above the fold, a one-page claim-info upload form, a list of every insurer the shop accepts, and a FAQ section answering the questions adjusters ask first ("Can you do supplements? Do you use OEM parts? What is your average cycle time?"). Tracked it as a separate funnel.
Tied a Podium SMS request to the shop's Mitchell repair-order system. Every customer got a review request 2 hours after they picked up their car. Reviews went from 47 lifetime to 89 in 90 days. Average rating climbed from 4.3 to 4.7.
We wrote 12 content pages, one per major adjuster the shop works with regularly, each titled "Working with [adjuster first name] at [insurer] — what to expect on your claim." Pages are useful, not creepy. Three adjusters now send our client's URL directly to claimants. None of those adjusters were sending referrals before.
AI tools we used
We do not pretend the work happens by hand. Three of our internal tools are the reason this engagement moved as fast as it did. Each of them replaces what used to be days of human time.
Custom AI we built that grades every search term on commercial intent, urgency, and local match in under a second. Replaces a half-day human audit.
Takes one bad search term and proposes the related variants we should also negate before they show up. Found 87 negatives nobody had thought of.
Crawls the site and fires every conversion event in a sandbox so you can see what is actually being recorded vs what should be. Caught the duplicate form fire in 4 minutes.
The execution
| Week | What we shipped | What moved |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Audit complete, photo schedule shipped to shop manager | First 35 photos uploaded |
| Week 2 | /insurance-claims landing page launched, claim-info upload form live | Page indexed, ranking page-1 for "auto body insurance Tampa" by week 3 |
| Week 3 | Podium-Mitchell review workflow connected | First 8 new reviews in 7 days |
| Week 5 | Adjuster content cluster live (12 pages) | Two named adjusters start linking the page in claim emails |
| Week 6 | Adjuster portal: simple password-protected page with shop hours, point of contact, current cycle time | State Farm desk-adjusters start using it as a reference |
| Week 8 | GBP photos hit 130, weekly Q&A schedule running | GBP impressions up 280%, calls up 90% |
| Week 12 | Quarterly review with shop owner | Referral run rate stable at 34/mo, retainer continues |
The numbers
The mix that produced the new run rate:
The 90-day engagement at $799/mo cost $2,397. At an average ticket of $3,200 and a 70% gross margin, the +23 monthly insurance referrals at the new run rate generate roughly $51,000 in monthly gross profit lift. The retainer pays for itself every other day.
I thought after 22 years on the DRP list the referrals would always come. Mark showed me how the adjusters were actually deciding. Photos and reviews. Things I had ignored for a decade.
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