How We Took a Cincinnati Landscaper From $1.8M to Over $4M in 12 Months

Hear From the Client

JPK Landscaping is a family-owned landscape design, installation and maintenance firm in Cincinnati, Ohio, specializing in medium-to-large outdoor living projects — custom design plans, paver patios, retaining walls, outdoor lighting, drainage and hardscaping. The business has run for more than 40 years and serves roughly a 25-mile radius across the Cincinnati tri-state area, including Northern Kentucky and southeastern Indiana.

Chad was doing the marketing himself, on top of running jobs in the field: “Before I was working with you guys, it was more of a one-man show. I was running a lot of Facebook, social media ads, doing my best with Google ads, but the quality of leads just weren’t there.”

Three things sat underneath that. JPK’s site was a managed template from a national provider — Chad didn’t even have admin access to his own Search Console, Analytics or Business Profile. In search it was effectively invisible: 42 keywords total, just 1 in the top 10, with the core money pages sitting on pages 4 and 5 of Google. The map pack was worse — 79% of the Cincinnati grid showed no ranking at all for “paver patio installation.” Not low rankings. No rankings.

We took ownership of the assets before optimizing anything. The domain was released from the incumbent provider, hosting was moved, the site was rebuilt on WordPress, and Search Console, Analytics and the Google Business Profile were re-verified in JPK’s name. You cannot improve what you do not control.

Then we went after the questions homeowners ask before they ever search for a contractor. A person planning a patio doesn’t start at “paver patio contractor Cincinnati” — they start at “do you really need sand under pavers.” We built that informational layer first, ranked it, and used it to feed authority into the commercial service pages beneath it. The map pack got its own workstream — a fully categorized profile, roughly 45 citations, and a steady two-posts-a-week cadence — because local rank runs on different rules than organic.

A new WordPress site launched in May 2025, then content at increasing volume — more than 50 SEO-optimized articles scaling from 2 a month to 12, plus 20 service and local pages built or rewritten. On top of that: a claimed and categorized Google Business Profile posted to twice a week, roughly 45 directory citations, 34 live link placements, two full technical audits, GA4 conversion tracking, and about 100 MB of image weight stripped out.

Before Lantern Sol, JPK's pipeline depended on paid social and Google Ads, and Chad was paying for every click whether the lead was any good or not. As organic rankings took over, he pulled back most of that spend. "I've spent a lot less money using social media ads and put that more towards the organic searches," he says. "I believe that's the reason why our bottom line has expanded so much." Now the leads keep coming without a cost attached to every click, and the content and rankings keep building month over month.

Organic traffic grew nearly 5x in eight months — clicks from Google went from 754 in October 2025 to 3,430 in May 2026, with impressions rising from 76,600 to 320,000. Average position improved from 25.9 to 9.0, breaking into Google’s top 10 for the first time, and the keyword footprint grew from 42 to 340 with 322 ranking in the top 10.

One article became the engine: “Do You Really Need Sand Under Pavers” pulled 1,727 clicks and over 124,000 impressions in January 2026 alone — more traffic than the entire site had earned in any month before the engagement. The leads got better, not just more frequent. By spring, Chad was seeing "double the amount of leads" compared with the year before, and "the leads were a lot higher quality and led to a lot higher conversions." The business went from $1.8M to over $4M in annual revenue, and the constraint moved from finding customers to finding crews. "The problem we have right now as a company isn't expanding," Chad says. "It's finding more workers to help us keep up with what you guys are bringing in."