A California Waterproofing Contractor Went From 3% to 15% of the Map in the Top 3
A waterproofing contractor in southern California. Decks, balconies, coatings, the work nobody thinks about until water finds its way through it. Five stars on Google and a map that showed them at 55 of 169 points, almost none of them near the top. We scanned 169 points across the service area on 3 April, days after we started, and again on 1 August.
Ranked somewhere. Almost never ranked high.
This is not the usual story of a business that ranks at the office and disappears a few miles out. This one was thin nearly everywhere. It showed up in enough places to look alive in a dashboard and in almost none of the places where a homeowner picks a name and calls it.
114 points returned nothing
Across the scanned area there were a hundred and fourteen places where a homeowner searching for a waterproofing company would not have been shown this business at all.
16.5th on average
Averaged across every point on the grid, on the term that matters most here. The scan only looks twenty deep, so 16.5 is close to the floor.
Five points in the top three, one at number one
Out of 169. That is under three percent of the service area where they sat in the box a homeowner actually reads.
The same service area, scanned twice, four months apart
Each marker is a real place on the map. We stood at 169 points across the service area, about 36 miles corner to corner, and asked Google from each one who they would use for a waterproofing company. The number in the marker is where this business came back.
Before, 114 of the 169 points returned nothing and only five sat in the top three. After, 91 points return the business and 26 of those are in the top three, with twelve of them at number one, up from a single point. The map is still a long way from solid green. It went from a business that was mostly missing to one that is genuinely there across the middle of its service area.
Where every point sat, before and after
Every search term we track, not just the good one
| Search term | Before | After | Movement |
|---|---|---|---|
| waterproofing contractor | 17.6 | 15.7 | |
| waterproofing company near me | 16.5 | 14.4 | |
| basement waterproofing | 17.6 | 20.0 went backwards |
Work carries on across dozens of other long-tail searches that this grid does not track.
Grid scans 3 April 2026 and 1 August 2026. 169 points, 3 miles apart. Rank shown is for "waterproofing company near me". This grid covers one search term. We track six on this account. Two moved a long way, three did not move at all, and one went backwards. The two that moved and the one that lost ground are in the table above; the three that stayed put are in the account's monthly report.
Same work, every week, for four months.
None of it is clever, and one part of it did not happen at all. We would rather list that in the same place as everything else than leave it out.
42 posts to the profile
Written around the actual services and the towns that get searched. Deck coatings, balcony repair, waterproof membranes, not filler.
8 questions answered
The ones a homeowner types before they ring anybody: what it costs, how long a coating lasts, whether it can be done with the tenants still in.
2 videos, published to Google and YouTube
Short, made from what the business already had, posted to the profile and to YouTube so the same asset works twice.
18 photo reminders, zero photos uploaded
This is the hole in the account. Job photos have to come off a phone on a real site, and we cannot take them for you. Eighteen reminders went out over the period and not one image came back.
17 review requests, 4 replies written
Ten of the seventeen reviews on the profile now carry a reply. Volume has not moved and we are not going to pretend it has.
99 completed actions in 89 days
That is the whole engine underneath the map. Most of it is dull and it has to happen anyway.
What moved, and what went the wrong way
Two search terms improved sharply and the call rate roughly doubled off a small base. A third term lost every point it had. Both of those things happened on the same account in the same four months, and both are on this page.
Monthly visibility, every month we have
Total times the profile was shown on Google Search or Maps, per month. Grey bars are before we started. The final bar is a part month, because Google reports about a week behind.
26 of 169 points in the top three
Up from five. On the term this business leads with, top-three coverage went from under three percent of the service area to fifteen.
Twelve points at number one
Up from one. Ranked points overall went from 55 to 91, so there are thirty-six places on the map where they now appear and previously did not.
Calls averaging 4.75 a month
Nineteen calls across April to July, against ten calls across the five months before we started, which is 2.0 a month. These are small numbers on both sides, so we are showing you the rate rather than a raw pair.
And what has not happened yet
One search term collapsed. Basement waterproofing sat at 17.6 on average with 62 ranked points at the baseline, and by August it read 20.0 with none. It lost every point it had. Basements are rare in this part of California and it is not a term this business leads with, but we did not delete the row and we are not going to. Deck waterproofing also slipped, from 47 ranked points to 40, while its average barely moved. Direction requests have not moved either. They are flat across the whole period and lower than they were last autumn, so we make no claim about them. Reviews have not moved at all: seventeen in total at 0.11 a month, with the most recent one 73 days old. And not one photo has been uploaded in the period despite eighteen reminders, which is the single biggest thing still holding this profile back.
All figures are from this business's own Google Business Profile and from geogrid scans run against Google's live results. Reporting periods are stated in full above.
One client's results over one period. Rankings, visibility and lead volume vary by trade, market, competition and season. Nothing here is a projection or a guarantee of what any other business will see.
The things worth asking about a page like this.
Because trade plus city often names a business outright, and our clients did not sign up to have their ranking history discussed in public. Trade plus state is as specific as we go. If you want to check any of it, ask on a call and we will walk you through the live dashboard.
Basement waterproofing went from 17.6 average and 62 ranked points to 20.0 and zero. It lost the lot. The honest answer is that we do not know exactly why. Basements are rare in this part of California, it is not a service this business leads with, and Google reshuffled a term nobody here was pushing. What we do know is that leaving it out of the table would have been the easy thing to do.
It could be, which is why the numbers under each grid are raw cell counts rather than a percentage we picked. 5 of 169 and 26 of 169 are countable off the picture, and so are the 114 grey points on the first one.
A little. Calls from the profile ran at 2.0 a month across the five months before we started and 4.75 a month across April to July. That is roughly two and a half times, off a base so small that one busy week swings it. We are not going to dress nineteen calls up as a flood.
It is early, and this is what early looks like. A grid that is mostly grey does not go mostly green in a quarter. What you should expect at four months is the pattern here: real movement on the one or two terms the business actually competes for, and not much anywhere else yet.
Get photos out of the crew. Eighteen reminders and zero uploads is the clearest gap on the profile, and image volume feeds both the ranking and the decision a homeowner makes looking at three options. After that, reviews. Seventeen at 0.11 a month is not enough to win a close call against a competitor with eighty.
See the same map for your own business
We will run the scan before you pay us anything. If it comes back mostly green, we will tell you so and you can keep your money.
Get my free ranking map