Case study · 90-day engagement
A Chicago moving company with 8 trucks was running profitable but plateaued at $290k/mo in revenue. The owner was working 70-hour weeks coordinating $400 local moves. He thought scaling meant adding trucks. The real lever was bigger jobs on the same trucks. Long-distance interstate moves average 4× the revenue of local with only 1.6× the labor. He was leaving the high-margin work on the table.
The challenge
The owner came in through a referral from another Chicago contractor. He needed to scale revenue without scaling crew. The bot scored his website at 67 — fine, not a website problem. The keyword tree was the problem.
We pulled his Google Ads data:
The fix was a parallel funnel: keep the local funnel humming, build a separate long-distance funnel, and ship both at the same time.
The plan
Built /long-distance with a different visual language: route maps, interstate truck photos, DOT/MC numbers prominent, binding-quote guarantee, real-time tracking screenshot. Hero copy: "Your move from Chicago to anywhere in the lower 48. Binding quote in 24 hours, on-truck tracking, full-service crew." Conversion rate hit 6.4% within 4 weeks of launch.
Built a 4-step calculator: where are you moving from, where to, how many bedrooms, when do you need to arrive. Generated a binding-quote range in real time. The quote auto-emailed to the customer + the dispatcher with all the details. 38% of quote requests booked within 14 days.
Built dedicated ad groups for the 22 highest-volume Chicago-to-X city pairs: Chicago to Florida, Chicago to Texas, Chicago to California, etc. Each group routed to a city-pair-specific landing page (e.g., /long-distance/chicago-to-florida) with route-specific photos and timeline. CPC averaged $11 vs $26 on broad terms because Quality Score on the dedicated pages was 8-9.
Added the company's DOT number, MC number, BBB rating, FMCSA-required disclosures, $5M cargo insurance certificate, and 4 third-party review widgets (Google, Yelp, BBB, Angi). Also built a "What to expect on a long-distance move" page that walked through the 5-7 day process with photos. Trust signals reduce price objections on $5k+ jobs.
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 | /long-distance landing page wireframe approved, calculator design started | Page hero approved by owner first revision |
| Week 2 | Page launched with binding-quote calculator | First quote request day 3, $4,800 binding quote |
| Week 3 | 22 city-pair ad groups + landing pages live | CPC averaging $11 on long-distance, vs $26 on broad terms |
| Week 5 | Trust-signal stack added (DOT, MC, BBB, insurance docs) | Long-distance close rate jumps from 22% to 41% |
| Week 8 | 10 long-distance jobs booked in week 8 alone | Owner adds 1 long-haul truck to handle volume |
| Week 13 | Final review | Run rate stable, retainer continues |
The numbers
The funnel split produced wins on both sides:
The $440k/mo run rate produces $5.3M/year. The 90-day engagement at $799/mo cost $2,397. The owner stopped working 70-hour weeks because the dispatcher had fewer jobs to coordinate (fewer, bigger, longer).
I had thought I needed to add trucks. Mark made me realize I needed bigger jobs on the same trucks. Long-distance was right there in my keyword data. I had been ignoring it because my website did not support it. Two months after we shipped the long-distance funnel, my trucks were earning twice as much per day.
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