Swap Backlinks With Referral Partners - Dmytro Perepelytsia of Home Service Base

Dmytro Perepelytsia co-owns an appliance repair company running in seven metro areas with 32 technicians, and he built Home Service Base, a market research tool for home service businesses covering 30 industries and almost 2,000 US cities. Follow the company on LinkedIn. In this episode he shares the local link play he says almost nobody in SEO talks about: turn a dead referral agreement into a backlink swap.

Dmytro has 15 years in software development and SEO. He sold his first backlinks as a teenager from a Joomla templates site, built a network of AdSense content sites in university, and grew a Ukrainian edtech platform he still owns to one million daily visitors during COVID. After the war in Ukraine brought his family to the US in 2022, he launched a home service business with a partner and grew it mostly through Google Business Profiles and local SEO. Read the full recap with quotes on Unscripted SEO.

What Dmytro and Jeremy cover:

• Why Home Service Base serves four kinds of customers: home service owners sizing up new markets, service providers and software companies prospecting them, and private equity firms sourcing acquisitions
• Re-estimating city-level search volume by combining Google Ads keyword data with Google Trends, because the big tools show national volume
• Why local SEO starts offline: where you open a location and what you name the business
• What a two-year-old cleaning company domain taught him about sponsoring local events for links
• The referral-agreement backlink swap with a water damage restoration company in Austin
• Backlink Price Finder, his Chrome extension that compares guest post prices across marketplaces

"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." - Dmytro Perepelytsia

Jeremy adds his own version: map the non-competing businesses around a home, from painters to flooring to mold remediation, and treat every one already ranking locally as a potential link partner. He also points listeners to the sponsorship search at ZipSprout for finding local events that want sponsors. More on that idea is in his write-up on jeremyriveraseo.com, and the step-by-step version of the referral swap is on SEO Arcade.

If you work on home services SEO, pair this with Jake Melendy on speed to lead for home services and Daniel Molina on running a local service agency.

Try Backlink Price Finder, and DM Dmytro on X - he offered listeners four free months.

Host: Jeremy Rivera. Recorded May 14, 2025.