Got a referral agreement with another local business that has never sent you a customer? You can turn it into a backlink this week. That’s the play Dmytro Perepelytsia, founder of Home Service Base and co-owner of an appliance repair company in seven metro areas, described on Unscripted SEO as the local link idea “almost nobody talking about in SEO space.”
Here’s the story, the process, and how to find the partners worth asking.
How a dead referral deal became a link from a trusted Austin site
A water damage restoration company emailed Dmytro’s repair business with a standard offer: send us customers with water damage and we’ll pay you. Months went by and his team never had one to send. In his words, the agreement “was like air, nothing. Nobody benefit from it.”
So he wrote back and proposed something both sides could use right away: exchange blog posts with backlinks to each other’s websites, and treat that as the referral agreement. They agreed. Dmytro got a link from what he describes as a big and trusted website in the Austin area, and sent one back.
“You can wait ages to get customers from someone. But you can benefit from day one of such collaboration by asking them to exchange like backlinks from blog posts.”
The reason it works is the ask itself. You aren’t cold-pitching an article swap. You’re offering a referral program the other company benefits from, and the link exchange is one term of it. Dmytro expects “conversion rate must be much higher of first iteration of communication than you just ask to exchange articles.”
The referral swap, step by step
- List the businesses that serve your customer but don’t compete with you. For a home service company that’s restoration, roofing, painting, flooring, tile, mold remediation, carpentry and design. Jeremy calls this the nexus around the home.
- Check who already ranks locally. A non-competing site that ranks in your city is the partner you want. Pull its referring domains in OpenSEO to see whether its own link profile is healthy before you ask.
- Offer a referral agreement first. Lead with what they get: you’ll send customers their way when you can.
- Make the blog post exchange part of the agreement. Each side publishes a post that links to the other. Your link starts working on day one, even if a referral never comes.
- Keep it local to local. Dmytro’s point is that this works “in every area” because both sites serve the same city’s homeowners.
If you already have referral agreements on paper, start there. Jeremy has about 15 of them and uses roughly five profitably for actual referrals.
Find the sites worth asking by reading a winner’s backlinks
Dmytro didn’t guess at this. He studied a home cleaning company running on a two-year-old domain that ranks against national brands in markets like Chicago and Austin, with almost no Google Business Profile presence. Its backlink profile showed heavy spending on local event sponsorships, things like pumpkin patches and community events, with banners on every event site.
That’s the second source of partners. Every city has event pages on the city hall site, universities, three or four event aggregators, and local news and radio sites that syndicate the big event platforms. Sponsorships can cost a few thousand dollars depending on the event, which Jeremy argues is a feature: it filters out competitors who don’t take links seriously. ZipSprout has a search for local organizations looking for sponsors.
Size the market with local volume, not national volume
Before any of this, Dmytro picks where to compete. His team uses Home Service Base, which grew out of an internal tool at the repair company, to estimate competition by city and industry. The volume method is worth copying:
- Pull Google Ads keyword data for each city and each industry, not just national totals.
- Adjust it with Google Trends to re-estimate real local demand.
- Compare competition city by city, including who advertises where and which marketing they use.
He covers about 2,000 cities and 30 industries this way, because the big SEO suites he subscribes to show general keyword volume for a term, “not local one.” Location choice and even the business name come out of that research. “Here you must prepare before you start the SEO in like offline world.”
If you’re building location pages for the markets you pick, our service area page examples show what the pages on the receiving end of those links should look like.
Price a link profile before you try to copy it
Dmytro also built Backlink Price Finder, a Chrome extension that checks the domains in a backlink report against listings he scrapes from guest post marketplaces. It shows the cheapest price and where to buy, and it estimates what a whole profile would cost to rebuild. He’s clear it isn’t exact, since sites missing from his database get missed. It’s still a fast way to see whether a competitor’s links are bought or earned, which tells you whether sponsorships and referral swaps are the faster route.
So which businesses around your customers already rank in your city? Which of your referral agreements have never sent a lead? And what would it take to turn each one into a post that links to you by the end of the month?
The full conversation, including Dmytro’s path from a Joomla templates site to an edtech platform with one million daily visitors, is in the Unscripted SEO recap. Jeremy’s take on the home services link nexus is on jeremyriveraseo.com.