Search funds
The growth plan for the business you just bought.
Most searchers buy a business with thirty years of goodwill and almost no digital footprint. We run the three channels that close that gap: local SEO, AI search visibility, and paid search. Self-funded or investor-backed, the work is the same shape. The sequencing and the reporting are not.
Free consultation. Works pre-LOI, at close, or on a business you already own.
Companies we work with
Two structures, two plans
Which one are you running?
A searcher with an SBA note and a personal guarantee has a different first ninety days than a fund with committed capital and a board. Pick the one that matches your deal.
Self-funded search
SBA-backed, one operator, debt service from month one
You signed a personal guarantee and the note starts amortizing this month. Marketing has to pay for itself quickly, and it has to avoid breaking what the seller spent thirty years building. That tension is the whole job.
See the plan
Traditional search fund
Investor-backed, a board to report to, a five-to-seven year hold
You have committed capital, a board, and a five-to-seven year hold. Marketing has to do two jobs at once: move the operating number this quarter, and build an asset that still looks like an asset when a diligence team pulls it apart at exit.
See the plan
What we run
SEO, AI search, and paid ads, in that order of patience.
Paid search produces calls in week one. Local SEO and AI visibility compound over months and then cost almost nothing to hold. Running all three lets the fast channel carry the note while the slow ones build the asset.
Local SEO
Ranking the business across its whole service area on Google Maps and organic search, measured neighborhood by neighborhood instead of by one citywide keyword that flatters the report.
- A full rank baseline before anything changes, so you know what you actually bought
- Google Business Profile custody, then categories, services, and service-area cleanup
- Citation and NAP consistency after the entity or the ownership changes hands
- Service and location pages built for the terms that convert, not the terms with volume
- Review velocity, because rating and volume move map rank as much as content does
AI Search Visibility
Getting the business named in the answer when someone asks ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, or Copilot who to hire in your market.
- Baseline tracking of which prompts surface you, which surface a competitor, and which surface nobody
- Entity consistency: one name, one address, one phone, one description everywhere a model can read it
- Schema and structured data, so services, service area, and hours are parsed instead of guessed
- Content written to answer the question directly, in the shape an answer engine will lift
- Depth in the review corpus, because AI answers quote what customers actually wrote
Paid Advertising
Google Search and Local Services Ads pointed only at the zones and terms where organic visibility is not carrying the load yet.
- Budget mapped to the rank data: spend where you are invisible, pull back where you already rank
- Local Services Ads and Google Guaranteed where the category supports them
- Call tracking and offline conversion import, so a booked job is the conversion, not a click
- Search-term and negative-keyword discipline from the first week, not the first quarterly review
- Reporting that ends at cost per booked job
Before you optimize anything
Six things that break at close.
Almost every recovery project we take on started with a well-meant change made before anyone checked what it was holding up. Handle these in order and the transition costs you nothing.
The Google Business Profile
Ownership sits with whoever claimed it, which is often a former employee or an agency the seller fired years ago. Recovering it can take weeks, and almost nothing else should ship until it is yours.
The name
Renaming on day one throws away the reviews, citations, and direct search the seller spent decades building. If the thesis requires a rebrand, it gets sequenced, not switched.
The reviews
Review history follows the profile, not the LLC. Lose custody of the profile in the transition and the business restarts with no rating in a market where everyone else has one.
The phone number
Port it, do not replace it. The old number is in every directory, every invoice, and the contacts of every customer the seller ever served.
The tracking
Most sellers have no conversion tracking at all. Until calls and forms are tracked, nobody can tell you what a lead costs, and every budget conversation is a guess.
The website and the domain
If the site is on the seller's personal hosting or registrar account, that is a hostage situation waiting to happen. Get custody in writing before close if you can.
Results
Real numbers from real campaigns.
The same work, on the same kind of local service business a searcher buys.
Local SEO & AI Visibility
One campaign, tracked on “calibration services near me”
- Improvement in local visibility
- 155.6%
- Average map ranking
- 10.6 to 5.2
- Share of top-3 placements
- 11% to 43%
Paid Advertising
First month after taking over one client's ad account
- Reduction in ad spend
- 41%
- Increase in conversions
- 25%
Reputation Management
What our reputation clients gain on average
- Average positive review growth
- 309%
- Average time to results
- 5 mo
- Average rating boost
- 3.4 to 4.7
- Positive reviews added
- +114
- Negative reviews removed or avoided
- -110
Results shown are from Tiger Digital client campaigns. Individual results vary.
Let’s find out what’s holding your business back.
Schedule a short call with our team to discuss what’s holding your business back and how we can help.