Rite Way was a Tucson-based HVAC company acquired by Redwood, a PE-backed firm that’s completed 35 acquisitions over four years. Since acquiring Rite Way, Redwood grew its revenue from $30 million to over $70 million.
When you first think about PE firms growing, it’s via acquisition. Yet digital marketing, specifically SEO, is another lever that can compound growth and often gets overlooked.
Tommy Mello grew A1 Garage Door Service into a $500+ million home service company and attributes his success to digital marketing and SEO. He stated, “SEO is very, very important. People are still going to your website to do research.” [source]
We want to share SEO tactics to help you think more strategically about private equity rollups and drive revenue growth at each of your locations.
Our Expertise in the Space
We helped Visterra Landscape Group, which acquires commercial landscaping companies, grow through digital marketing and strategic SEO decisions. When we started working with them, they had 4 locations; now they have over 15.
The playbook they initially had wasn’t working when they entered growth mode. Let’s dive into this, as it will set the stage for what you should be focusing on.
One Centralized Domain
Once a private equity company begins acquiring multiple companies, the power lies in having a single centralized domain. Yet Visterra wasn’t utilizing this. Let me explain.
When we took over marketing for Visterra, they had four different websites, one for each different landscaping company. The issue is that each of these sites had a relatively low authority score. Once they reached 8 websites, it was no longer manageable, and the strategy had to change.
Authority score is the number of quality backlinks pointing back to your site. You can see that Oberson’s, one of their companies, has an authority score of 17, which is decent.
Visterra’s parent company’s website, prior to the redirects, had an authority score of 22. Nothing spectacular but better than a 17.
When you properly execute a redirect and consolidate multiple websites into a single centralized domain, the authority score increases. This creates a snowball effect. Each piece of content you create should be easier to rank because you have a more authoritative site.
The main Visterra website, which had an authority score of 22, would increase to the mid-30s after all of the redirects. To summarize, the more companies you roll up, the more powerful your website becomes, creating a compounding effect.
Each Company Becomes a Content Resource
It used to be easy to rank on Google by creating a service area page. Let’s say you own a landscaping company in Columbus and you want to rank in the suburbs; you simply create a new page for “Gahanna Landscaping Company” with keywords and headlines sprinkled throughout.
Google got smart. They want to see real examples and make sure you’re a legitimate company.
This is another true advantage that a private equity company holds over local competitors. They have multiple locations to pull from that serve many markets. For example, Visterra’s Full Care, one of their brands, serves St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Louisville, with work spanning the core suburbs of each market. This creates a natural opportunity to build out location pages for every city and suburb they serve.
Most local competitors don’t have an in-house marketer or agency, whereas most private equity companies have someone dedicated to gathering content across the locations.
When we built out a location page for Full Care, we incorporated:
- Photos of team members and job site images
- Videos specific to each brand
- Testimonials pulled from their Google Business Profile
- Internal links to service-specific pages
- Location pages for each market they serve, internally linked to one another
- A dedicated section on the brand’s unique story and history
When you combine the stronger domain with more authentic content, it’s tough for a local competitor to outrank private equity.
Leveraging Your Blog
Once you have a strong authority score, each piece of content you write becomes easier to rank for.
RotoRooter generates over $1 billion in revenue with more than 600 locations. They have an authority score of 55, which is excellent according to SEMRush’s standards.
They wrote a simple blog about “How to clean your garbage disposal.”
This one blog generated 37 backlinks from highly authoritative sites. Those backlinks raise the authority score of every other page on the site, including your service and location pages
If you had multiple sites, it’d be hard to succeed with this blog strategy.
Your private equity firm should be publishing content that answers the questions your customers are actually searching. For example, service guides, maintenance tips, market-specific content. This will compound and continue building authority over time.
Related Blog: What is Topical Relevance for SEO
Turn Your Website into a B2B Lead Generator
You can turn your website into a lead generator for business owners looking to sell.
Going back to Visterra, we’re working with them on a page titled “Private Equity for Commercial Landscaping Companies.” The page serves as sales collateral for business owners considering a sale, answering their questions and making the case for Visterra as the right partner.
They have a team dedicated to reaching out to business owners to gauge interest in selling. Having inbound leads streamlines the process.
With a strong authority score, there’s a good chance that if you built this page on your site and executed properly, it would rank well.
Below is what this sort of page would look like on a private equity website.
In Summary
This blog focused on what I believe is the most important part of private equity SEO: leveraging a single, centralized domain.
There are plenty of SEO tactics we didn’t cover (Google Business Profile optimization, review management, internal linking). I didn’t think these were distinct enough for this article.
One domain, built the right way, compounds over time, just like your portfolio.
