Several agencies publish case studies that show lead growth for local businesses, including Watson & Co., Magister Digital, Summit Digital Marketing, Intellibright, and Sunstone Digital Tech. They aren’t equally useful. Some give you a percentage and a logo. Others show monthly lead counts, name the tracking tool, and admit what the data can’t prove. This case study uses Sunstone’s own local work to show what the stronger standard looks like, and how to test any agency’s claims against it.
Executive summary: +186% organic leads for a competitive local market
The headline result comes from Sunstone’s Rochester work for ROC Property Managers: organic traffic grew 241% and organic leads grew 186% across Rochester searches. Both figures come from the client’s published case study results.
ROC is a local service operator, which makes it a fair stand-in for the home services buyer: high-intent searches, tight geography, and a sales cycle that starts with a Google search or a Maps listing. The same logic applies to roofers, plumbers, HVAC companies, and gutter contractors.
What made the work different from a standard “rank higher” engagement was the order of operations. Measurement came first, then local visibility, then conversion. Traffic was never treated as the goal, because a 241% traffic gain means little if calls and form fills don’t move with it. Here they did.
What competitors publish and where the gaps are
A fair comparison shows why “has case studies” is a low bar.
- Watson & Co. publishes home services examples with specific lead counts and revenue figures, and it pairs them with an exclusive territory model. The numbers are concrete. The path from tactic to result is thin.
- Magister Digital’s gutter company local SEO case study is among the more transparent in the category. It shows monthly lead counts, the share coming from Google Business Profile, a cost-per-lead figure, and the limits of the data, including seasonality and how spam was handled. It uses CallRail for tracking.
- Summit Digital Marketing leans on logos and testimonials across many entries. Execution detail, meaning how audits, tracking, and location pages were actually built, is hard to find.
- Intellibright aggregates many case summaries with revenue growth, ROAS, and ranking improvements, though the summaries stop short of process, context, and client quotes.
The pattern is consistent. Numbers are getting more specific, but method, visual proof, and measurement rules still lag. Those are the three areas where a buyer can separate evidence from marketing.
Client background: a crowded Rochester market and a broad service list
ROC Property Managers faced two problems that show up in almost every local services account.
The first was competitive local search. Rochester searches are contested, and local results are split between the map pack and organic listings. A business can rank in one and be invisible in the other.
The second was a broad service offering. When a company sells many services, a single generic services page can’t rank for any of them well. Each service needs its own page, with its own intent, copy, and call to action.
“Lead growth” also needed a definition before any work began. For a local service business, a lead is a tracked event: a call over a minimum duration, a submitted quote form, or a booked inspection. Page views and impressions don’t count. We aligned on that before touching a single page, because a campaign can’t be judged against a goal nobody wrote down.
Strategy: three stacks, built in a deliberate order
Sunstone approaches local lead growth as three connected systems. The sequence matters more than any single tactic.
Attribution and tracking come first
Call tracking and form tracking go in before any optimization work, so the baseline is clean. The point is to separate lead sources: organic search, Google Business Profile and Maps, and paid. If a campaign is organic and local only, the report says so. Mixing paid and organic into one lead total is the fastest way to make a case study unreadable.
This is also where the keyword “call tracking leads attribution” stops being jargon. Without it, you can’t tell whether the phone rang because of a rebuilt service page or because of a Maps listing that was already working.
Local visibility: Google Business Profile, Maps, and service-area pages
On the visibility side, the work covers Google Business Profile optimization (categories, services, descriptions, photos, review response), plus a page architecture built around how people search: one page per core service and clear coverage of the towns and neighborhoods the business serves. Town pages only help when each one has real local substance. Swapping a city name into duplicate copy doesn’t count.
Demand capture: make the click convert
Visibility without conversion is a cost center. Service pages get a clear primary action, a visible phone number, short forms, proof near the decision point, and message match with the search that brought the visitor in. Sunstone’s conversion work uses behavioral analysis and A/B testing, so changes follow what visitors actually do on the page.
Quick wins first, compounding work second
Profile fixes and tracking cleanup can show movement within weeks. Page architecture, content, and authority take longer. Sequencing them this way gives a client early evidence while the slower work compounds. It’s also why Sunstone cites a 73% lead gain in 60 days as a proof point for faster-moving accounts, while treating the longer ROC and Window World timelines as the fuller picture.
Results: what moved and how to read it
| Metric | Account | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | ROC Property Managers (Rochester) | +241% |
| Organic leads | ROC Property Managers (Rochester) | +186% |
| Monthly organic sessions | Window World | 428,000 to 1.23 million (+187%) |
Two things are worth saying plainly about these numbers.
Leads grew more slowly than traffic at ROC (186% against 241%). That gap is healthy. It means the added traffic included visitors who weren’t ready to call, which is normal when rankings expand across more searches. A case study where leads outrun traffic by a wide margin should raise a question about how leads were counted.
Percentages also hide baselines. A 186% gain from a small starting number is a different business outcome than the same percentage from a large one. When you evaluate any agency, ask for the starting count, the ending count, and the date range. The full breakdowns sit on the ROC Property Managers case study page, and the Window World case study covers a national-scale account with a large non-branded search opportunity.
Measurement rules that make results believable
Whatever the source, a lead number is only credible when four things are stated:
- What counts as a lead (call duration threshold, form type, booked job).
- Whether spam and duplicate contacts are excluded.
- Which system produced the final number (for example, a call tracking platform plus Google Analytics).
- Whether seasonality affects the comparison period.
Magister’s gutter case study earns credit here for naming seasonality and spam handling. That’s the bar. Every Sunstone case should meet it too.
Visual proof: four screenshots that settle arguments
Numbers in a paragraph are claims. Numbers next to the export they came from are evidence. A good local lead case study includes four visuals, each with a plain-language caption:
- Google Business Profile performance: calls, direction requests, and website clicks over time. The caption should say which months are compared.
- Analytics conversions: lead events by source, with the date range visible.
- Ranking trend for “near me” and service-plus-city terms: the same keyword set tracked before and after, so the comparison is fair.
- Dashboard snapshot: call volume and form fills in one view, so a non-marketer can see the trend without decoding a chart.
A one-page downloadable summary pairs well with these. It should list the baseline, the date range, the lead definition, and the tracking source on a single sheet an owner can forward to a partner or a bank. That is the document most buyers want and most agencies don’t provide.
Client voice and permission
A testimonial should be a verbatim quote from a named person at the client company, used with their permission. A paraphrase should be labeled as one. When an agency shows unattributed praise, or a logo without a quote, ask who approved it. Sunstone’s case study library at Sunstone’s case studies lists the client accounts, including Window World, Mosquito Man, ROC Property Managers, Omnia Exterior Solutions, and Ground Works, and results are reported with client approval.
The operational change a client describes tells you more than praise does. Look for specifics: calls are answered faster, quote requests arrive with usable details, or the sales team can see which source a lead came from. Those are signs the lead growth reached the business and didn’t stay inside a report.
Lessons from the work
Define the lead before the campaign. Every dispute about results traces back to a definition nobody agreed on. Write it down in week one.
Track sources separately. Organic, Maps, and paid belong in separate columns. Combined totals feel good and teach nothing. If you’re comparing paid and organic lead growth, you need the split to know where the next dollar should go.
Give each service its own page. Broad service offerings are an advantage only when search engines and visitors can see each service clearly. This also feeds AI search visibility, because answer engines pull from pages that state one thing clearly.
Fix conversion on pages that already rank. A service page sitting on page one with a weak call to action is the cheapest lead gain available. Sunstone’s conversion rate optimization work starts there.
Expect leads to lag traffic. Treat a modest gap between traffic growth and lead growth as normal. A large gap means the wrong searches are driving visits.
What to do in the next 30 days
You don’t need an agency to start the evidence trail. Four steps will give you a defensible baseline:
- Week 1: Install call tracking and form tracking, and write your lead definition.
- Week 2: Audit your Google Business Profile: primary category, service list, photos, review responses, and hours.
- Week 3: List every service you sell and check whether each one has its own page with a clear call to action.
- Week 4: Export your baseline (leads by source, GBP calls, top keyword positions) and save it with the date range.
Industry-specific accounts follow the same sequence. If you sell window replacement, for instance, the window replacement marketing page shows how local SEO, ads, and reviews fit around estimate calls.
How to vet any agency’s lead growth claims
Ask for three things: the baseline and ending counts, the tracking source, and one client you can speak with. A strong agency answers in a day. Sunstone has worked with 2,500+ clients since 2018, holds a 4.9 Google rating, and publishes its SEO case studies so buyers can read the results before they talk to anyone.
If you run a home services or local business and want to know whether your market and tracking setup are ready for this approach, request a free proposal from Sunstone. The first conversation covers your geography, your service mix, and what a clean baseline looks like for your account.
