Unscripted SEO · Host: Jeremy Rivera · Guest: Dmytro Perepelytsia, founder of Home Service Base and co-owner of an appliance repair company
What do you do with a referral agreement that never sends you a single customer? Dmytro Perepelytsia turned his into a backlink. A water damage restoration company in Austin offered to pay his appliance repair business for referrals, nothing came of it for months, and then he wrote back and proposed they swap blog posts with links instead. They agreed, and he picked up a link from what he calls a big and trusted website in Austin.
Dmytro has 15 years in software development and SEO. He co-owns an appliance repair company that runs in seven metro areas with 32 technicians, and he built Home Service Base, a market research and analytics tool for home service businesses that covers 30 industries and almost 2,000 US cities. On this episode of Unscripted SEO, he walks through how he went from selling his first backlinks as a teenager to ranking a home service business in markets he’d never worked before.
From a Joomla templates site to one million daily visitors
Dmytro’s first SEO money came in 2007 or 2008, while he was still in school. He built a Joomla site where people could download templates, it picked up organic traffic, and he sold a few backlinks from it. “That’s how I got my first $50 from selling backlinks for SEO purposes.”
In university he learned to code and started combining the two skills: custom-built content sites, copywriters on staff, monetized through Google AdSense. That traffic became the base for a Ukrainian edtech platform he still owns. It was already at about 250,000 daily visitors before COVID. When remote learning took over, it hit one million visitors a day, mostly students and teachers.
Then the war in Ukraine brought Dmytro and his family to the US in 2022. He met a partner, launched the appliance repair business, and applied everything he knew. “For now we work in seven metro areas, work with 32 technicians, grow mostly organically with like Google business profiles and local SEO.”
Local SEO starts before you touch the website
I asked what surprised him most moving from general SEO to local. His answer is the part I’d tape to the wall of anyone opening a second location: local results are heavily dependent on the area and the competition level there, and a lot of the work happens before any SEO does.
“How you choose the area for your location, how you choose name for your business to rank locally. So it’s a little bit different than it works in like general SEO. So here you must prepare before you start the SEO in like offline world.”
That’s also the problem Home Service Base was built to solve. It started as an internal tool at his repair company to estimate competition in different cities and industries and to see who advertises where. Today he balances four target groups:
- Home service businesses deciding which market to expand into
- Service providers that use its company database to prospect home service businesses
- Software companies selling into the trades, who filter that database by the tools a company already uses
- Private equity firms looking for established companies with a strong digital presence as acquisition candidates
One detail you should steal: Dmytro doesn’t trust national search volume for local decisions. He pulls Google Ads keyword data for each city and each industry, then reworks it with Google Trends to estimate real volume. As he put it, the big tools he pays for show him general keyword volume, “not local one.”
What a two-year-old domain taught him about local links
Dmytro learned how much backlinks matter as a customer, working with two large Ukrainian SEO agencies, one of which ran a separate backlink budget for his edtech site. When he got to local SEO, he tested whether it still held. He hired a team to do crowd marketing on forums close to his topic, and within a month or two his local pages started growing in organic search.
Then he found a home cleaning company on a two-year-old domain that was beating national players in competitive markets like Chicago and Austin, with almost no Google Business Profile presence. When he dug into its backlink profile, he found heavy investment in local event sponsorships, things like pumpkin patches and community events, with banners on all of those sites.
This is where I got excited, because it’s something SEOs sleep on. Every city has its own ecosystem: the city hall site, university event pages, three or four event aggregators, and syndication from the bigger event platforms out to local news and radio station sites. You don’t need guest posts. You need to show up in places that are relevant to your business. If you’re hunting for those events, ZipSprout has a search for local organizations looking for sponsors.
The referral swap almost nobody talks about
Dmytro called this “one more idea for which I think almost nobody talking about in SEO space.” Here’s how it played out:
- A water damage restoration company emailed his appliance repair business offering to pay for referrals.
- Over a long stretch, his team never had a customer to send them, so the agreement produced nothing for either side.
- Dmytro wrote back and proposed they exchange blog posts with backlinks to each other and call that the referral agreement.
- They agreed, and he got a link from a big, trusted website in the Austin area.
“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. And it’s something which can be utilized by any company in every area.”
His framing for outreach matters too. You aren’t asking for a link. You’re offering a referral program the other company benefits from, and the link exchange is part of the agreement, so the first reply rate should be much higher than a cold “let’s trade articles” email.
It lines up with what I tell local service clients in my first consultation. Picture the home as a hub with spokes coming off it: painters, flooring, tile, mold remediation, carpenters, designers. They all want the same homeowner. If they’re already ranking locally and they don’t sell what you sell, they’re not your enemy – they’re your best friend. I go deeper on that map in my write-up on the home services link nexus, and the step-by-step version of Dmytro’s swap is on SEO Arcade.
Backlink Price Finder: what would their link profile cost you?
The same cleaning company inspired Dmytro’s Chrome extension. He wanted to know what it would cost to place guest posts on the sites linking to it, and he noticed the same publishers show up across several link marketplaces at different prices. So he built a scraper that collects listings from those marketplaces into one database, then a Chrome extension that sits on top of Ahrefs, Semrush and Google results.
Open a site’s backlinks and Backlink Price Finder checks each domain against his database, shows the cheapest price and where to buy it, and estimates what the whole profile would cost to rebuild. He’s upfront that the estimate isn’t exact, since it can miss sites not in his database. He built it in about a week with Cursor – “this AI helps me to do it five times faster.”
If you have time and money tied up in links, that comparison alone can save you on both. Dmytro has since moved his focus to Home Service Base, but the extension still works, and he offered Unscripted listeners four free months if you DM him.
Where to find Dmytro Perepelytsia
Dmytro is most active on X. You can explore local market data for 30 home service industries at Home Service Base, follow the company on LinkedIn, or grab Backlink Price Finder and ask him for the listener trial.
For more home services SEO on the show, hear Jake Melendy on speed to lead for home services and Daniel Molina on building a local service agency.
🎧 Listen to the full episode or watch it on YouTube, and subscribe to Unscripted SEO so you catch the next one.
