Search Engine Build · From Scratch

Building a Commercial Water Damage Search Engine From Scratch

commercial water damage

I didn’t start out wanting to be in the water damage business.

I got there through marketing.

For years I had been helping contractors generate business online, including restoration companies around the country.

Water damage was an interesting category from a marketing standpoint because the intent was so strong.

Nobody casually shops for water damage restoration.

Something happened.

A pipe broke.

A roof leaked.

A sprinkler system discharged.

A building flooded.

There is water somewhere it isn’t supposed to be, and somebody needs to deal with it.

Usually quickly.

At first, I looked at that primarily as a marketer.

What are people searching?

Where are they searching?

Which keywords generate calls?

Which cities generate opportunities?

How do we get the phone to ring?

Then I started SuperBest Water Damage & Flood Repair.

And once I got inside the actual restoration business, I started looking at those leads completely differently.

Part 01

A Lead Isn't Necessarily a Good Lead

This sounds obvious now.

It wasn’t nearly as obvious when I was looking at everything from the marketing side.

Marketers love leads.

Phone rang?

Great.

Form submission?

Great.

Cost per lead went down?

Even better.

But once you’re responsible for actually servicing those leads, you learn pretty quickly that not all water damage jobs are created equal.

Some jobs are profitable.

Some are great projects.

Some lead to good relationships and additional work.

Some aren't worth rolling a truck for.

Others can consume technicians, equipment, travel time, monitoring time and administrative resources while producing very little return.

And some customers are considerably better to work with than others.

That changed the way I thought about marketing.

The question was no longer:

How do I generate more water damage leads?

It became:

How do I generate more of the water damage jobs I actually want?

That’s a much better question.

Part 02

Marketing Eventually Sent Me Back to School

The more involved I became with restoration, the more I realized I didn’t want to understand the industry only from the marketing side.

If I was going to market water damage intelligently, I needed to understand what happened after the call came in.

So in 2020, I went through training with the IICRC — Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification.

I became certified in Water Restoration Technician (WRT), Applied Structural Drying (ASD), and Commercial Water Damage.

I wanted to understand the actual work.

Water movement.

Extraction.

Moisture.

Psychrometry.

Air movement.

Dehumidification.

Structural drying.

Equipment placement.

Documentation.

Monitoring.

And what actually happens when water gets into a building.

That education changed the way I looked at restoration.

Marketing taught me how customers find restoration companies.

Training taught me more about what it takes to actually dry a structure.

SuperBest taught me something else entirely:

Which business I wanted to be in.

Part 03

I Learned What Jobs Were Worth Chasing

There’s a big difference between knowing how to generate a phone call and knowing whether you want the job on the other end of that phone call.

I started seeing it firsthand.

Certain jobs made sense.

Others didn't.

A project could require inspection, travel, technicians, extraction, equipment setup, documentation, daily monitoring and customer communication.

That air mover sitting on a marginal job can’t be deployed somewhere else.

Neither can the dehumidifier.

Neither can the technician.

Neither can your truck.

Neither can your time.

So I became much more interested in resource allocation.

What's the scope?

Who's the customer?

How much equipment will this require?

How long will it be deployed?

What's the potential revenue?

How complicated is collection going to be?

What's the likelihood the project expands?

Is there reconstruction involved?

Is this somebody we want to build a relationship with?

Suddenly "water damage lead" wasn't a useful enough description.

Some were opportunities.

Some were distractions.

And some were a complete waste of time and resources.

That distinction matters enormously when you’re the one running the business.

Part 04

I Also Learned Which Customers I Wanted

This was probably the bigger realization.

Residential restoration can be an excellent business.

It just wasn't where I wanted to focus.

Residential water damage is incredibly personal.

You're standing inside someone's home.

Something they care about has been damaged.

They're stressed.

Sometimes they're angry.

They may not understand the insurance process.

They may not understand why equipment has to stay in their house.

They may not understand why drywall needs to come out.

And that's understandable.

It's their home.

But I found myself much more comfortable in the commercial business environment.

The conversations were different.

Facility managers.

Property managers.

Building owners.

Operations managers.

General contractors.

Commercial adjusters.

Risk managers.

Business owners.

These were people accustomed to dealing with vendors, schedules, buildings, contracts, budgets and operational problems.

The discussion became less emotional and more operational.

What happened?

What's affected?

What's the scope?

How quickly can we stabilize it?

How much equipment do we need?

What areas can remain operational?

What needs to be documented?

What's the drying plan?

When can we get back to normal operations?

I liked those conversations.

I liked those customers.

And I liked the professionalism of the business environment.

Part 05

Commercial Was Simply More Interesting to Me

Then there was the scope of work.

A flooded warehouse is a completely different problem from a wet bedroom.

So is a hotel.

An office building.

A distribution center.

A retail property.

A healthcare facility.

An industrial building.

A large commercial loss introduces entirely different considerations.

Inventory.

Employees.

Tenants.

Customers.

Building systems.

Operations.

Safety.

Containment.

Access.

Large equipment deployments.

Multiple decision makers.

Insurance.

Documentation.

Business interruption.

Now the problem isn’t simply:

How do we dry this building?

Sometimes the bigger question is:

How do we dry this building without unnecessarily shutting down the business?

That fascinated me.

Because now restoration becomes a business problem as much as a water problem.

Part 06

Eventually I Made a Decision

I didn’t want to be everything to everybody.

I didn’t want to chase every broken washing-machine hose.

I didn’t want to build a giant marketing system designed to make the phone ring with every possible water damage job.

I wanted to focus on the segment of the business that made the most sense to me.

Commercial water damage. Exclusively.

Better clientele.

Larger scope of work.

What If We Built the Search System Around the Jobs We Actually Want?

Most restoration websites follow basically the same model.

Water damage.

Fire damage.

Mold.

Storm damage.

Carpet cleaning.

Residential.

Commercial.

Twenty services.

Twenty cities.

And somewhere inside all of that is a page saying they also handle commercial water damage.

I wanted to turn that completely upside down.

Instead of building another restoration website with commercial buried inside it:

Build the entire thing around commercial.

That became CommercialWaterDamage.co.

Not another general restoration site.

A platform specifically designed around commercial water losses.

Part 08

Go Narrow. Then Go Deep.

Once I made that decision, the possibilities got much bigger.

If we’re only talking about commercial water damage, we can go considerably deeper.

Water extraction.

Water removal.

Structural drying.

Moisture mapping.

Containment.

Selective demolition.

Reconstruction.

Inventory protection.

Contents restoration.

Sprinkler discharge.

Roof intrusion.

Broken water lines.

Business continuity.

Return to operations.

Then organize that information around different properties.

Warehouses.

Distribution centers.

Office buildings.

Retail properties.

Hotels.

Healthcare facilities.

Industrial buildings.

Multi-tenant commercial properties.

And then there’s another layer.

The people.

Part 09

Different People Care About Different Things

The building owner isn’t necessarily asking the same questions as the facility manager.

The facility manager isn't thinking exactly like the adjuster.

The adjuster isn't thinking exactly like the operations manager.

An owner may be worried about the total financial exposure.

A facility manager may be worried about moisture migration and coordinating vendors.

An adjuster may need documentation.

An operations manager may have one immediate concern:

Can I keep this place open?

That’s why I don’t think commercial water damage should be treated as simply a bigger version of residential restoration.

The building is different.

The customer is different.

The economics are different.

The decision-making process is different.

The scope is different.

So the search experience should be different too.

Part 10

Then I Started Building the Map

This is where the project started becoming much bigger.

Las Vegas.

Phoenix.

Scottsdale.

Denver.

Chicago.

Boston.

Philadelphia.

San Diego.

San Francisco.

Seattle.

Portland.

Then the surrounding commercial markets.

Then different property types inside those markets.

Then different kinds of losses.

Then different search behavior.

At some point you’re not really building a restoration website anymore.

You're building a search engine around commercial water damage.

That’s the experiment.

Part 11

Let the Market Tell Us What to Build Next

One of the things I’ve learned over the years is not to assume I know everything before launching.

Build something.

Put it out there.

Watch.

Measure.

Adjust.

Search impressions appear.

Keywords appear that you hadn't considered.

A city starts getting traction.

A property type starts getting impressions.

People start searching combinations you didn’t necessarily predict.

That's information.

Then you build around what the market is telling you.

I've always preferred that approach.

I can sit in a room and speculate about what Google wants.

Or I can put something into the market and watch what actually happens.

Build. Measure. Improve. Repeat.

Part 12

AI Changes the Scale

This is also where AI has completely changed what’s possible.

Think about the amount of information involved in trying to do this nationally.

Hundreds of cities.

Thousands of contractors.

Different building types.

Different types of water losses.

Different customers.

Different project sizes.

Different contractor capabilities.

Search queries.

Content.

Market data.

Internal links.

Project information.

You can drown in the details pretty quickly.

AI gives us the ability to organize that information at a scale that would have required a much larger operation only a few years ago.

But I’m not particularly interested in using AI to generate thousands of generic water damage pages.

That’s easy.

I’m interested in whether AI can help us understand the relationships between the information.

Customer + Property + Loss + Location + Scope + Contractor Capability.

That’s where it gets interesting.

Part 13

The Contractor Is Part of the Equation Too

The other lesson I learned from actually being in restoration is that restoration companies aren’t interchangeable.

Some operators are excellent at residential losses.

Some specialize in insurance work.

Some are built for large commercial losses.

Some have huge equipment inventories.

Some have experienced commercial project managers.

Some can mobilize across several states.

Some are outstanding local operators.

And some simply aren't equipped for a major commercial loss.

That's okay.

The point isn’t that every restoration company should do everything.

The point is matching the right opportunity with the right operator.

Which brings me back to what I learned years ago with SuperBest:

More leads isn't necessarily the answer.

Better opportunities are.

Part 14

Now the Pieces Are Coming Together

Looking back, the progression makes sense.

Marketing introduced me to restoration.

Restoration led me to start SuperBest.

SuperBest made me want to understand the technical side.

That led me to IICRC training in WRT, ASD and commercial water damage.

The training helped me understand the science.

The actual jobs taught me the economics.

The customers taught me who I wanted to work with.

And all of it eventually pushed me toward one conclusion:

Commercial.

Now I’m taking everything I learned and approaching the problem from the opposite direction.

Instead of asking:

How do we generate every possible water damage lead?

I’m asking:

How do we build a national system designed specifically to identify and capture high- quality commercial water damage opportunities—and connect them with operators capable of handling them?

That’s a much more interesting problem.

And that’s what I’m building with CommercialWaterDamage.co.

Part 15

SuperBest Was the Education. This Is the Next Iteration.

I don’t look at SuperBest as something separate from what I’m doing today.

It was part of the education.

It taught me things a marketing report never could.

Which calls you want.

Which calls you don't.

Which jobs consume resources.

Which projects justify the resources.

Which customers you enjoy dealing with.

Which part of an industry fits the way you want to operate.

And sometimes figuring out what you don’t want to do is every bit as valuable as figuring out what you do.

For me, that process narrowed an enormous restoration industry down to a very specific opportunity:

Commercial water damage.

Quality clientele.

Meaningful scope.

Professional business relationships.

Complex problems.

And a national market that’s fragmented enough to be interesting.

So now I’m building the machine around it.

And just like everything else I’m working on:

We're nowhere near finished.

Keep exploring