Background

Dryer Vent Wizard, part of the Neighborly Corporation with over 30 home service brands, specializes in dryer vent repair, installation, and maintenance.

New customers find the service when their appliances display error codes and need help — a search moment ripe for content-driven SEO.

Semrush specifically called out that because this company does residential and commercial work, that they were weak on the commercial side... even from a large language model point of view, [the tools] saw those weak points and also called out what they were really strong at

Jonathan Banks, Director at Activate Digital

The Challenge

Despite operating as a franchise business with over 120 locations, Dryer Vent Wizard’s organic traffic was flat.

Activate Digital, initially brought in to manage ads, was later given permission to take on organic content to address the issue.

The problem with DryerVentWizard.com [was] that the organic traffic is quite low. For over 120 locations, the traffic was sitting flat at like 25,000–26,000 new organic users per month

Jonathan Banks, Director at Activate Digital

The challenges were multi-faceted:

Low organic traffic (~25K new users/month across 120+ locations)
Weak presence in commercial services, limiting growth opportunities
Difficult access to subject matter expertise, as franchise owners were too busy to contribute expertise regularly
Strong competition for high-intent queries, making it harder to stand out in search

What They Did

To tackle Dryer Vent Wizard’s stagnant traffic, Jonathan Banks and his team turned to Semrush to uncover hidden gaps in the brand’s content strategy.

Semrush quickly surfaced the questions customers were asking in both Google and AI platforms — along with synthesized answers that revealed exactly where competitors were winning.

We had a good strategy, but the AI Visibility tool gave us the questions that people were typing into Google. And it not only gave us the questions, it gave us the synthesized answer. So now we could reverse engineer and figure out where that content was being made from.

Jonathan Banks, Director at Activate Digital

One opportunity stood out: dryer error codes.

Customers often ran into cryptic error codes on their dryers, leaving them stuck and frustrated — a perfect high-intent moment for capturing attention. Yet, surprisingly, a single competitor blog was pulling in an estimated 12,000 monthly visits on the topic, despite offering little depth or design.

Jonathan’s team seized the gap, creating a more comprehensive, well-structured resource and localizing it across 100+ franchise sites. The result: rapid visibility gains and rankings across markets.

We installed this error code blog, localized it for over 100 locations, and every one of these locations locally is now ranking for error codes.

Jonathan Banks, Director at Activate Digital

The questions uncovered by Semrush also became a powerful collaboration tool.

Jonathan shared them with executives, who could quickly weigh in on areas of expertise, and later turned the list into a new client intake form. This ensured that subject matter knowledge was captured early in every relationship.

The insights didn’t just power SEO and AI search. They also shaped advertising strategy.

Using customer pain points and questions as raw material, the team developed messaging around these topics surfaced by Semrush, refined by experienced franchise owners — and within two months, produced 35 commercials for Meta, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

Finally, the tool’s efficiency gave Jonathan a way to scale execution. What used to require senior-level SEO expertise could now be handled by junior team members.

It’s like a content gap analysis automatic tool… I can give this to a junior SEO specialist, and they can do the job that a senior does almost immediately.

Jonathan Banks, Director at Activate Digital

The Results

Within just two months, Activate Digital Media achieved measurable impact for Dryer Vent Wizard:

#1 rankings on ChatGPT and AI Mode for priority queries
10% increase in leads from AI visibility

Organic traffic doubled, jumping from 25K to over 50K monthly users
10% of all franchise leads now coming from AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and SearchGPT

Every one of these locations locally is now ranking for error codes. The traffic is now almost doubling because of the content that we're adding now. In addition, 10% of the leads across 100 locations are now coming from AI sources, including Perplexity in Search GPT.

Jonathan Banks, Director at Activate Digital

How Semrush Helped

Semrush gave Activate Digital a shortcut to senior-level strategy by:

Identifying content gaps automatically — saving time and validating insights
Uncovering relevant user questions and answers — improving collaboration and subject matter expertise
Empowering junior SEOs to perform at a senior level — accelerating execution and quality
Driving multi-channel impact — fueling 35+ commercials on Meta, LinkedIn, and TikTok, proving its value beyond SEO

We got insights about questions and answers that we didn't have before. And not only that, this helped us with ads.

Jonathan Banks, Director at Activate Digital

AI Insights for Advertising Ideas

The same insights that drove SEO also powered ad creative. Using customer questions and pain points as raw material, Jonathan’s team produced 35 commercials in just two months, rolled out across Meta, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

Key Takeaway

With the right tools, agencies can turn hidden content gaps into growth opportunities — even in competitive, multi-location industries.

Semrush's powerful AI search data helped Activate Digital double traffic, capture AI-driven leads, and even sharpen their ad strategy.

Want real business results from AI search?