You see another home service site ranking in your city and your first thought is “enemy.” Well, the truth is that if it doesn’t sell what you sell, it’s probably the best link partner you have. I said a version of that on a recent episode of Unscripted SEO with Dmytro Perepelytsia, and he had already proven it with his own appliance repair company.
Dmytro co-owns that company, which runs in seven metro areas with 32 technicians, and he built Home Service Base, a market research tool for home service businesses. He got a link from a big, trusted Austin website by turning a referral agreement that never produced a customer into a blog post exchange. That’s the move. Here’s the map I use to find more of them.
Draw the nexus around the home
In my first consultation with a local service business, I have them sit down and brainstorm every parallel, non-competing business that serves the same customer. I think of it as a nexus. If you’re a roofer, the house is the hub and the spokes come off of it:
- Painters, flooring companies and tile guys
- Mold and water damage remediation
- Carpenters, custom carpenters and luxury carpenters
- Designers and luxury designers
They’re all trying to reach the same homeowner. If one of them already ranks locally and it isn’t also a roofer, why, they’re your best friend. They already have the article that ranks for something like how to increase your home value, which opens the door to a link from a page Google already trusts in your market.
Dmytro’s version starts from the other end: the referral offer. A restoration company asked to pay him for water damage referrals. When none came, he proposed they swap blog posts with backlinks and call that the referral agreement. “You can wait ages to get customers from someone,” he told me. “But you can benefit from day one of such collaboration by asking them to exchange like backlinks from blog posts.” I walk through the exact steps on SEO Arcade.
Stop pitching your “valuable resource”
The outreach email that says “I have this valuable resource, would you like to add a link to it?” is dead. It goes right into spam, and even when it doesn’t, why would anybody do that? Your content isn’t more valuable because it links to theirs. You have to flip it on its head.
A referral partnership does that, because it’s a legitimate business process before it’s a link. I have about 15 referral partnerships on paper and I’ve used maybe five of them profitably for actual referrals. Thinking of them in terms of backlink opportunity is why I told Dmytro his idea was brilliant. Each one is a business that has already agreed it wants a relationship with you. Asking for a post exchange inside that relationship is a much smaller ask than a cold pitch.
Sponsor the pumpkin patch
The second half of the nexus is the local event ecosystem, and SEOs actually sleep on it. Every city has one. What happens there gets reflected on the city hall site, university event pages, three or four event aggregators, and even local news and radio station sites that syndicate event data from the big platforms.
Dmytro found a home cleaning company on a two-year-old domain beating national players in Chicago and Austin, and when he dug into its backlinks, it was sponsoring pumpkin patches and community events with banners on every one of those sites. I was literally doing the same thing for a location page in Fontana, Wisconsin, where a little festival was fundraising and had its own site, so I sent the owner a note about sponsoring it.
You can set up your own fun run or charity cause site if you want to. Or you can find the five or 20 people who have already taken the pain to set one up and ask to be listed as a sponsor. ZipSprout has a search tool that shows who in your city is looking for sponsorship.
Yes, a sponsorship can cost a few thousand dollars. I think that’s part of why it works. It’s a self-eliminating process: the competitor who doesn’t take links seriously won’t risk the ROI, so the people left in that space are the ones who understand it.
Why this matters more now that anyone can publish 400 posts
Agencies that used to write four posts a month can now use ChatGPT to make 400. Google already knows that’s a problem – the helpful content update was its first weapon in that fight – and mass content creation is going to play itself out quickly. A link from a pumpkin patch sponsor page or a neighboring contractor’s blog can’t be mass produced. There’s no downside to finding the local orchard and asking if you can sponsor it.
Dmytro also built a Chrome extension, Backlink Price Finder, that estimates what a competitor’s link profile would cost to rebuild from guest post marketplaces. Run it on the local winner in your market. If the number is huge and the links are sponsorships and partners, you know which route to take.
The whole conversation, including how Dmytro grew a Ukrainian edtech site to one million daily visitors before moving to the US, is in the Unscripted SEO recap.
So go draw the nexus around your customer’s house. Then go knock on the neighbors’ doors.