I won't and can't guarantee rankings or visibility. But here's what I did, and what I think is helpful.
The at-bat: A full season of base hits. It all adds up.
Client: Cenvar Roofing, residential retail roofing
Role: Stephen Vernon served as Cenvar's CMO before starting Base Hit Marketing. Cenvar then became Base Hit's first client, through a training handoff to their in-house team completed in July 2026.
Growth during that time: from 5 locations in Virginia (Lynchburg, Roanoke, Charlottesville, Richmond and the New River Valley) to offices across Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, Maryland and Pennsylvania
The problem
At agency rates, a company with several locations can only work on a few at a time. SEO doesn't work in rotation: by the time the third location is done, the first needs attention again. Cenvar was opening new markets faster than that model could keep up.
The roadmap
- Built the SEO function in-house, run by someone who understood roofing first and learned search second.
- Built technical infrastructure and location pages that could scale as new markets opened, so new locations launched with organic visibility from day one.
- Created a content system around real jobs. Each completed project became a recap page with real project details and local language, covering neighborhoods and searches no service page would naturally reach.
- Tested paid channels alongside organic, including a three-month test of overlapping Local Services Ads areas.
- Trained Cenvar's in-house team to run the system, then handed it off.
What moved
- Organic search brought in 122,786 users from January 2022 to July 2026, within 1.4% of paid search (124,476) over the same period.
- Organic visitors stayed on the site 85 seconds on average, compared with 47 seconds for paid.
- 11,691 returning users came from organic search, compared with 7,201 from paid.
- Since 2024, the job recap pages have earned nearly 7,000 non-branded impressions across 57 job markets, from Kingsport, TN to State College, PA.
- Page-one keywords grew from 11 in October 2020 to 644 in October 2024.
What didn't
Organic didn't replace paid. It matched it in users, but paid search stayed part of the mix the whole time. Third-party keyword estimates also swung hard in 2022, which is why only the October 2020 and October 2024 points are used here.
About the data: user and engagement numbers come from Google Analytics 4. Keyword counts are third-party estimates from SE Ranking, not Search Console. A company growing from 5 locations to five states has a lot driving it, and I'm not claiming that growth came from SEO.
How I work
That's why technical SEO is always so big to start with. That's why a roadmap is vital to follow. Not just an "SEO partner" that sells blogs, guest articles and backlinks.
This is the same model Base Hit builds for residential roofing companies today. See roofing SEO or talk to Stephen.
