Case study · 90-day engagement
A Houston concrete contractor with 18 years of experience pouring driveways, foundations, and patios was watching his Google Maps ranking slide every quarter. He had 12 reviews. His main competitor had 280. He thought he needed to "buy reviews" or "rebuild the website." Neither was the answer. The fix was a stack of photos he already had on his phone.
The challenge
The contractor came in through a Houston builder's referral. The bot scored his website at 60 — fine, not a website problem. The GBP score was 38. That is where the leak was.
We pulled his GBP data. The damage:
The contractor was an excellent operator with no marketing presence. The fix was to make the GBP match the actual quality of his business.
The plan
Scheduled 2 photos a day for 90 days, every day. Pulled from his existing job photos (he had 6,000+) plus new ones from active jobs. Each photo got a caption with the job type, square footage, and Houston neighborhood. Mix of progress shots, finished work, before-and-after, and team-on-site. By week 13 the GBP had gone from 4 photos to 180.
Tied a Podium SMS request to his Square invoicing system. Every customer got a review request 4 hours after their final invoice was sent. We helped him write a 90-second post-job video to send with the request — owner-on-camera, thanking them for the job, asking for feedback. Review velocity went from 1.5/mo to 12/mo by week 8.
Updated hours to actual hours (Mon-Sat 7-6, Sun emergency). Added secondary categories: foundation contractor, driveway contractor, patio contractor, retaining wall contractor, sidewalk contractor, slab repair. Added the Q&A section with 8 of the questions he gets asked weekly, answered. Added attributes: free estimates, 24-hr emergency, BBB accredited.
License + insurance were already in place. Background check cleared in week 5. LSA badge live by week 8. From week 8 onward, "Google Screened" appeared on every relevant Houston concrete search. His GBP listing started showing up in the LSA 3-pack 60% of the time within 4 weeks of badge approval.
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 | GBP cleanup: hours, categories, attributes, Q&A. Photo schedule shipped to contractor | "Open now" filter visibility 4× same week |
| Week 2 | Podium-Square review workflow connected | First 8 new reviews in 7 days |
| Week 4 | 30 photos uploaded, GBP impressions up 180% | First 3 inbound calls from GBP search |
| Week 5 | LSA application submitted, all docs gathered | Background check kicked off |
| Week 8 | LSA badge live, 60 photos uploaded, 38 new reviews | First LSA call within 6 hours |
| Week 11 | 120 photos, 78 reviews, ranked top-3 on Houston Maps for 5 keywords | GBP calls hit 62/mo |
| Week 13 | Final review | Run rate stable at 78 GBP calls/mo |
The numbers
The mix that produced the new run rate:
Average concrete job ticket in Houston runs $4,200-$8,500. The +64 monthly GBP calls at his typical 35% close rate represents roughly 22 new jobs/mo at an average $5,800 ticket = $128k/mo in new gross revenue. The 90-day engagement cost $2,397.
I had been pouring concrete in Houston for 18 years and had less to show for it on Google than a guy who started in 2022. Mark made me realize the algorithm does not care about how long you have been in business. It cares whether you have shown up on Google Maps. After 90 days I had shown up.
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