Building Erik His Own Lead Channel: A Crawlspace Doctor Bloomington Case Study
Erik Robbins runs Crawlspace Doctor Bloomington. He’s a local franchisee of a national crawl space repair brand, and when we first sat down together in April of 2025, his whole online presence ran through the franchise’s system. He didn’t have a website of his own. He was paying an annual fee to the franchisor just to have someone else manage his Google account. If a homeowner in Monroe County searched for crawl space help, whatever they found wasn’t really his.
That’s what we set out to fix.
What we actually agreed to do
I still have the recap email I sent him the day after that first meeting. The goal was simple to state and not simple to do: build a real website under the Crawl Space Doctor Bloomington name, keep the franchise branding because it carries real trust, and get it ranking for the kind of searches homeowners actually run. Encapsulation. Humidity control. Mold. We talked about setting up his own Google Workspace so he wasn’t dependent on the franchise for his own email and business listing. We talked about Facebook ads. Some of that happened. Some of it is still sitting on the list, and I’ll be honest about that later.
We built the site on WordPress. Over that spring, Erik and I met in person a few times, mostly at his shop on Knightridge Road, and Raymond and I put together the service pages, the SEO structure, and the Google Business Profile work. By July, everything was indexed cleanly. By fall, the core site was live.
The problem nobody had named yet
Here’s the part of this project I actually think is worth writing about.
Once the site was up and starting to rank, we noticed something. Erik’s own site, the one we’d just built specifically for his local market, wasn’t the top result for “crawlspace encapsulation Bloomington Indiana.” The national franchise’s own website was. They have a location page for Bloomington on their own domain, and because it’s the same brand name sitting on a much older, much more authoritative domain, Google favored it over Erik’s.
That’s not something you fix with a better meta description. It’s a structural problem. Erik was, in a very real sense, competing with his own franchisor for his own city.
So we changed the approach. Instead of trying to out-optimize a bigger domain on generic terms, we leaned all the way into what only Erik could credibly claim: hyper-specific local knowledge. We added schema markup so Google could clearly read what the site offered and where. We rebuilt the service area page county by county, with real local detail instead of a repeated template. We wrote an FAQ section grounded in the questions homeowners actually search for, not the ones that sound good in a meeting. We wrote a full walkthrough post on what actually happens during an encapsulation job, written in Erik’s voice, with his real specs (a 16-mil liner, a 20-year warranty, two to four days of work) instead of generic industry language.
None of this was about beating the franchise head to head. It was about giving Erik something the franchise’s own page couldn’t have: content that could only have come from someone who actually works crawl spaces in Southern Indiana.
What changed
I want to be careful here and only use numbers I can actually stand behind.
Search visibility moved in a real, if modest, way. In January of 2026, the site hit a new record of 40 organic clicks in 28 days. By April, that record was 60. By July, Google Search Console was reporting 51 clicks and just over 6,800 impressions in a month, with an average search position of 17.9, which is roughly the middle of page two. Erik noticed the same thing from his end before I even sent him the report: “a link to my website was shown over 6000 times,” he wrote back. “Seems real good.”
But the number I actually care most about is a quieter one, and it’s not from Search Console. It’s from Erik’s own inbox. His site has a built-in estimate request form, and I went back and counted every single one of those emails. From the first one in early October of 2025 through the end of August 2026, there were roughly 78 of them. Real homeowners, filling out a form on Erik’s own site, asking for an estimate. That’s not a metric a franchise dashboard hands you. That’s a lead channel Erik owns outright, and it didn’t exist before this project.
I don’t have a clean before-and-after here. I don’t know exactly what the franchise system was sending him before we started, and I don’t yet know how many of those 78 leads turned into actual booked jobs. Those are honest gaps, and I’d rather say that plainly than round up. What I can say is that the site is now doing something it wasn’t doing a year and a half ago: putting real, first-party leads directly in front of the person who does the work.
What I’d do differently
Some of this took longer than it should have, and most of that wasn’t Erik’s fault or mine, it’s just what working with a busy small business owner actually looks like. A spreadsheet of FAQ questions sat untouched for months at a time. Erik’s not a website person, and he said as much more than once, in exactly those words. That’s fine. That’s most of my clients. But it means the pace of a project like this isn’t the pace of the plan you write on day one, and I’d rather build that expectation in up front next time than treat every gap as a problem to solve.
There’s also work we talked about early on that never happened. Erik never moved off the franchise’s Google account onto his own Workspace. We never ran the Facebook ads we discussed. Neither of those was a failure exactly. They just weren’t the highest-value thing in front of us at any given moment, and a small local business only has so much bandwidth for a web project at any one time. They’re still on the list.
The actual takeaway
If there’s one thing I’d want another franchisee, or honestly any small business owner working under a bigger brand, to take from this: your name being attached to something bigger than you doesn’t automatically work in your favor online. Sometimes it works against you. The fix isn’t to fight the bigger name on its own terms. It’s to build something only you could have built, and let that be the thing that actually reaches the people down the street who need you.
That’s what we did for Erik. It’s still a work in progress. But the leads are coming in, and they’re his.