The pipeline was leaking budget. We rebuilt the machine behind it.
Five months of paid search, Local Services Ads, and technical SEO across three Washington markets — rebuilt account architecture, one source of truth for lead quality, and a budget split that pays for itself. April closed as the strongest month of the engagement on every metric that matters.
Budget was going out. The return was a guess.
ELG runs estate-planning and probate practices across three Washington markets. Spend was live, but nobody could say what a lead actually cost, where it came from, or whether it was worth having.
- Legacy ads. Older campaigns were burning budget at CPLs north of $150 with no clear intent targeting.
- No attribution. Leads landed with no source tag — impossible to tie cost to qualification or to a signed client.
- Thin LSA. Local Services Ads were unoptimised, missing top-of-page presence in every market.
- SEO debt. The site carried broken links, a missing sitemap, and dozens of title, meta, and H1 gaps.
Four moves. In their stack, not a strategy PDF.
Retired the legacy campaigns and stood up Dynamic Search campaigns for Spokane and Tri-Cities. Segmented Seattle Probate into its own campaign and restructured the ad groups where CTR and CPL were worst.
Set Local Services Ads up from zero, drove toward top-of-page dominance, and moved to a 70/30 LSA-to-PPC budget split — a split the April data went on to validate.
Every lead now carries its source. Cost per lead is read against real qualification and signings — a single source of truth for what each channel is actually worth, not just form-fill counts.
Worked through 17 tracked technical issues — broken links, missing sitemap, title, meta and H1 gaps, crawl blocks, orphaned pages. Ran a backlink audit and disavowed the toxic links through Search Console.
Numbers, not adjectives.
| Metric | February | March | April | Mar → Apr |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blended CPL | $75.74 | $70.78 | $42.34 | ↓ 40.2% |
| PPC CPL | $151.56 | $95.71 | $30.44 | ↓ 68.2% |
| LSA CPL | — | $59.96 | $50.56 | ↓ 15.7% |
| PPC conversions | — | 36 | 47 | ↑ 30.6% |
| HubSpot contacts | — | 142* | 278 | all-time high |
| Clients signed | — | — | 15 | best month |
*March HubSpot figure covers a half-month of tracking.
The 70/30 split, validated.
April spend of $4,868.73 returned 115 leads at a blended $42.34. Local Services Ads carried the volume; paid search carried the efficiency.
| Channel | Spend | Leads | CPL | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PPC — Google Ads | $1,430.75 | 47 | $30.44 | 4 campaigns · 306 clicks · 5,577 impressions |
| LSA — Local Services | $3,437.98 | 68 | $50.56 | Spokane 27 · Seattle 17 · Tri-Cities 24 |
| Blended total | $4,868.73 | 115 | $42.34 | All channels, all markets |
- Tri-Cities. Most efficient market — $35.39 LSA CPL at 96.51% absolute-top impression rate.
- Spokane. Absolute-top presence strengthened to 88.08% by month end; 27 charged leads.
- Attribution. LSA Tri-Cities delivered the cleanest lead quality of any source in the account.
- Next lever. Seattle’s LSA bid cap is the one open gap — flagged as the highest-priority next action.
What we handed back.
- LSA launched and optimised in all three markets — 200+ charged leads under $55 CPL across the engagement.
- Dynamic Search campaigns built for Spokane and Tri-Cities, replacing legacy campaigns that were burning budget.
- Seattle Probate segmented — CPL landed at $17.93, from no dedicated campaign at the start.
- PPC cost per lead improved 80.3%, from a $151.56 opening-quarter average to $30.44 in April.
- Per-channel lead-quality attribution built in HubSpot — every source now measured on signed clients, not clicks.
- Full technical SEO audit closed out — all 17 tracked errors resolved or documented, toxic backlinks disavowed.
| Metric | Start | April | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| PPC CPL | $151.56 | $30.44 | ↓ 80% |
| Blended CPL | $70.78 | $42.34 | ↓ 40% |
| LSA CPL | $59.96 | $50.56 | ↓ 16% |
| Spokane LSA top | 83.1% | 88.08% | ↑ 5 pts |
| Clients / month | — | 15 | new benchmark |
First we build your pipeline.
Then we build the machine that scales it.
Same discipline, whether it's paid search for a law firm or a full revenue engine for a B2B startup — foundations first, proof in numbers.