Six Years of Growth, Built on Digital
Background
Having grown up in the Caribbean in a wild family of five boys, Max and Nate Perkes were accustomed to a life full of adventure and risk. Their mother's guiding phrase — "Work hard, play hard" — became a core value in each of their families. True to that spirit, when they decided to start a pest control company, they didn't ease into it. They sold everything, relocated their families from Idaho to Omaha, Nebraska, and launched Midwest Pest Control in September 2020 — in the middle of a global pandemic.
If they were going to do this, they were going to do it right.
"We wanted the foundation of our company to be built on really good marketing, SEO, and website content. We needed that foundation before we started anything else." — Nate Perkes, Co-Owner
Before opening their doors, Max and Nate had done their homework. They'd organically searched pest control companies across the country and noticed a pattern: a lot of Coalmarch clients were ranking in the top positions. They talked to current Coalmarch clients directly. What they heard convinced them.
"When you spend that much money for marketing, you're either going to love it and continue on, or cancel it. It spoke volumes that Coalmarch had numerous clients that had been with them for so long." — Nate Perkes, Co-Owner
Midwest Pest signed with Coalmarch before a single customer walked through the door.
The Challenge:
Starting a pest control business from scratch in an unfamiliar market is hard enough. Doing it during a pandemic — with no local reputation, no reviews, no word-of-mouth base — meant that credibility had to be built fast, and it had to be built online.
The brothers had set an aggressive goal: $1 million in recurring revenue within their first year. To hit that number, they couldn't afford to wait on organic brand recognition to develop slowly. They needed a professional digital presence that would make a new business look like an established one, and they needed leads coming in from day one.
The challenge that followed year one was a different kind: how to scale a marketing engine fast enough to keep up with a company that kept setting and blowing past its own goals.
The Coalmarch Approach
Coalmarch built the foundation first — a professional website optimized for pest control in Omaha and the surrounding Nebraska markets. From the start, the site was designed to convert, not just rank. Within weeks, the Perkes brothers had a digital presence that established instant credibility in a market where they were brand new.
"The website showed customers that we know what we are doing. It didn't matter that we had been in business for three weeks — our customers saw the professionalism in our website and it instantly gained their trust and credibility for us." — Max Perkes, Co-Owner
Alongside the website launch, Coalmarch ran targeted PPC campaigns from day one, ensuring Midwest Pest was visible to high-intent searchers immediately. As the business grew and expanded into new markets, the strategy scaled with it — building out SEO content for Iowa markets like Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, and Ankeny; layering in geo-clustering to improve local pack rankings across secondary Nebraska cities; and developing topical content that established subject-matter authority beyond the home market. By 2026, Midwest's marketing had matured into a multi-channel operation spanning organic search, paid search, local pack optimization, and AI search visibility — running across markets in Nebraska and Iowa with the sophistication of a company that had been investing in digital marketing for a decade.
The Results
Year by Year
The results haven't come in a single moment — they've built on each other, year over year, since day one. Midwest Pest Control hit $1M in recurring revenue in Year 1 — the goal Max and Nate had set before they ever opened their doors.
"We want to be part of another case study that says 'Midwest Pest: $0 to $2 million in 2 years.'" — Max Perkes, Co-Owner — from our original 2021 case study
They made good on that. By the end of Year 2, Midwest had exceeded that target by 35% — not just hitting the bar Max set publicly, but clearing it by a wide margin. The growth continued from there. Year over year, the company kept scaling, and today Midwest Pest Control has crossed over $7M in annual revenue. From a pandemic-era startup with no customers and no local reputation, to a multi-market operator outranking national brands in its own backyard.
Marketing Performance Highlights
Beyond the revenue numbers, the underlying marketing data tells a story of compounding results across every channel. In organic search, Midwest has built the kind of local visibility that takes years to earn. The site ranks in the local map pack across the vast majority of its tracked keywords — consistently in the top positions — with city pages in Iowa markets converting qualified traffic at rates that tell you people are finding exactly what they're looking for. Blog content has become a meaningful traffic driver on its own, with topical pieces earning placements in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and other generative platforms. That last part matters: 38 AI citations as of 2026 means Midwest Pest Control is showing up in the search experiences most local competitors haven't even started thinking about.
On paid, the Iowa expansion has been a standout. Midwest more than tripled paid lead volume in Iowa year-over-year, while across all markets the company holds a 31% impression share — the highest in its competitive set, ahead of Orkin, Terminix, and Amazon. Cost per lead has stayed below the national industry benchmark, a meaningful achievement as the local pest control market has gotten more expensive to compete in.
Geographic Expansion
Midwest Pest launched with a single focus: Omaha, Nebraska. By 2026, the company's footprint had grown to span multiple markets across Nebraska and Iowa — a geographic expansion that required not just operational growth, but a continuously evolving marketing strategy to match it.
Coalmarch built out market-specific content, geo-clustering, and Google Business Profile optimization for each new city as Midwest expanded, ensuring the site's local authority grew in step with the company's physical reach. Iowa markets including Cedar Rapids, Ankeny, Des Moines, Waterloo, and Ames were added to the targeting strategy as the Perkes brothers pushed into new territory. The backlink profile has grown to 881 links across 384 referring domains — a foundation that compounds authority across every new market the site targets.
The strategy adapted at each stage — from a startup focused on building Omaha credibility, to a multi-market operator running localized campaigns across Nebraska and Iowa with a paid media footprint that covers six states
What’s Next
Nearly six years after two brothers packed up their families and moved across the country to start a pest control company in a city they'd never called home, the work continues. Six years in, the digital foundation built in 2020 keeps compounding — more markets covered, more of the search landscape owned, and a growing presence in the AI-powered search experiences that are reshaping how customers find local services.
For a company that bet on digital before they had a single customer, the return on that bet keeps growing. The Perkes brothers set out to build a company on a foundation of strong marketing. That foundation has held — and keeps getting built on.
“None of this would have been possible without Coalmarch, or our amazing team of technicians and office staff. In another year, we want to be part of another case study with Coalmarch that says ‘Midwest Pest: $0 – $2 million in 2 years’.”