Twelve years of work, parked on someone else's address.
Everything we covered on the call, what I found on your site afterward, and what I would build first. Nothing here is a surprise. It is the conversation, written down, with prices attached.
Everything we covered on the call, in one page
So we are working off the same facts, here is what you told me.
- You are not a normal franchisee. You founded Blingle twelve years ago, built the systems, and sold them to Horsepower when franchising started five years ago. You own the Omaha and Lincoln markets, and as a founder you have room to move that a standard operator does not.
- Holiday lighting is about 75% of revenue. Permanent and landscape are what you want to grow. Both are getting crowded because the product got cheap and everyone is selling a program to get people into the trade.
- Your website is a page on blingle.com, run by Scorpion. It has been set and forget for a while. You think you could probably break away but need to check what the agreement allows.
- Your reviews are strong. 156 reviews at 4.9 stars, which puts you second in the market behind a company you put around 178. You ran a review reactivation over the last twelve to eighteen months and it worked.
- You want to be the name people ask for. Your words: the Pepsi of permanent and landscape lighting in Omaha, over the next two to three years, while the cheap entrants fizzle out.
- You asked two fair questions. Does a standalone site just compete with the Scorpion page? And does a metro of about one million justify this yet? Both are answered below.
One thing you said stuck with me more than the rest. When I asked what has been missing, you said the anti value add with Scorpion has been the blog posts and the constant content. I went and checked that after we hung up.
Five things I found on your site after we hung up
I want to be straight with you about one of these first. Your content is not bad. The permanent lighting page runs past 2,000 words, has a real FAQ, and name drops Charles Schwab Field, the College World Series, Blackstone and Benson. Somebody did actual work. So this is not a pitch about your copy being weak. It is about where it lives and what is missing around it.
"Sorry, there are no posts at this time."
That is what loads at blingle.com/omaha-ne/about-blingle/local-blog/ right now. The nav link is there. The page is there. The posts were never written. Twelve years in business and the content engine has published nothing.
You named this on the call before I had checked it. You were right.
| What matters | Blingle Omaha today | TruLight Omaha |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns the domain | blingle.com/omaha-ne. Rented. | trulightomaha.com. Owned. |
| Published prices | None anywhere on the site | $1,500 to $4,500, stated openly |
| City pages in your own sitemap | Pages exist, but are missing from it | 10 cities, listed and linked |
| Reviews shown on the site | One unnamed testimonial | Rating and count on every page |
| Event lighting page | Not on Omaha. Lincoln has one. | Not their category |
| Blog posts | 0 | Publishing |
What each one is actually costing you
The empty blog. This is the big one. Google and AI decide who to recommend partly by who keeps showing up with something new to say. An empty blog is not neutral. It reads as a business that stopped talking.
No published prices. When somebody asks ChatGPT or Google what permanent lighting costs in Omaha, the answer gets built from pages that actually state a number. TruLight states one. You do not. So they get named and you do not, on a question that only a buyer asks.
Orphaned city pages. You have real pages for Papillion, Bellevue and others, with genuine local detail in them. Highway 370, Papillion Landing, the freeze thaw cycles. They are just missing from your own sitemap, so they are harder to find and carry less weight than they should. Somebody built them and never wired them in.
No event lighting page in Omaha. You are listed on WeddingWire and The Knot, so you clearly do this work. Lincoln has the page. Omaha does not. That is a category you are already selling with nothing on the site to catch the search.
Reviews sitting off the page. 156 reviews at 4.9 stars is your single strongest asset and it is barely visible where people decide. That is the cheapest fix on this list.
Every fix above lands on an address you don't own
This is the part that decides whether any of the rest is worth doing. Right now your Omaha location is a folder on the franchisor's domain. Fix the blog, add the prices, wire up the city pages, and all of that value accrues to blingle.com. Not to you.
You build authority. It lands on blingle.com. You share that domain with every other Blingle franchise in the country, all pulling on the same name.
You build authority. It lands on a domain with your name on it. Nobody else is drawing on it. It is worth something the day you sell the business.
Scorpion runs their own content system. Changes go through them, on their schedule, in their format.
We publish directly. A page goes live the day it is written. No queue, no ticket, no waiting on a vendor.
If the franchise switches vendors, or you sell, or the relationship ends, you start over. There is no file to take with you.
You own the site, the pages, the content and the data. If you fire us, we hand you the files and a one page moving guide. That is the whole exit.
Omaha being smaller is the argument for doing this, not against it
You asked whether a metro of about a million justifies this yet. Here is the honest read. In Austin you would be fighting two hundred companies with real budgets and a ten year head start. In Omaha I count roughly eight companies competing for permanent and holiday lighting, and not one of them is publishing consistently. Your closest competitor beats you on owning their domain and stating their prices. Nobody has taken the content ground because nobody has bothered.
Small market means the gap is closeable. It also means that once you close it, there is not enough oxygen left for anyone else to catch up. That is what being the Pepsi actually looks like. People ask for it by name, and the name is the whole advantage.
The Siri point I mentioned on the call still holds. Siri now leans on Gemini, which is Google, so your Google presence and your Google profile feed the AI answers directly. You do not have to bet on AI to benefit from this work. Fixing the Google side fixes both.
Three ways to build it, and what each one gets you
All three are custom. We do not use WordPress or a template. Every page is written for Omaha and built so Google and AI can read it cleanly. Prices are one time, and the site is yours the day it launches.
Foundation
- Home page built to convert
- All six service pages including the event lighting page Omaha is missing
- About and meet the team
- Project gallery with your real work
- Reviews page pulling your 4.9 stars forward
- Contact and free design consultation
- Schema markup so AI can read the business
- Blog built and ready to publish into
Market Coverage
- Everything in Foundation
- City pages for the ten suburbs worth having, wired into the sitemap this time
- Pricing page with real ranges, the page that wins the cost question in AI answers
- FAQ hub marked up so answers get pulled directly
- Warranty and service page, aimed straight at the cheap installer problem
- Commercial and HOA page for the higher ticket work
- Color and scene gallery for the RGB systems
Two Markets
- Everything in Market Coverage, for Omaha
- A full Lincoln build on its own domain
- Lincoln service pages including event lighting
- Lincoln neighborhood pages: Country Club, Irvingdale, Meadowlane, Yankee Hill and the rest
- Both markets on one design system, so future pages cost less
- Separate Google profiles handled correctly, no crossed wires
Lincoln is worth a sentence on its own. You own that market too, and right now it is a page on blingle.com with a phone number and a template. Festive Expressions has been the trusted Lincoln name for two decades and Trimlight has its own Lincoln domain. If Omaha proves the model, Lincoln is the same play at half the incremental cost because the design system already exists. It does not have to be now. It should not be never.
What pages a lighting company actually needs
You asked what should be on there. This is the answer, grouped by what each group is for. Marked in red are pages you do not have today.
The core set
The pages that win the searches you want
City pages, wired in properly this time
The warranty and service page is your answer to cheap installers
You told me the market is filling up with people who got in because the product got cheap. That is not a problem you solve on price. It is a problem you solve by being the company still standing in year three when the LEDs start failing and the installer has stopped answering the phone.
Nobody in Omaha has that page. It costs nothing extra to build, it gives your sales team something to send, and it turns twelve years in business from a line in your about page into the reason somebody picks you.
The monthly packages, and what each one moves
The site is the foundation. The monthly work is what makes it compound. These are the three prices I quoted you on the call, all month to month with a 14 day cancellation, no contract.
Stay Visible
- Post to your Google profile every day, written for Omaha, no palm trees
- Respond to every review, including the ones sitting unanswered
- Review generation so you pass 178 and take the top spot
- Photo uploads, geo tagged
- Map pack optimization and tracking
- Monthly one page snapshot
Grow
- Everything in Stay Visible
- A few blog posts a month, on topics people are actually searching
- New pages built as we find gaps
- Keyword research behind every piece, not guesswork
- The technical side of the site kept clean
- Live dashboard so you see what is working
SwarmSystem
- Everything in Grow
- About 10 blog posts a month
- Full topic map built and worked through
- Local PR and link building
- Both markets covered if you have launched Lincoln
- Monthly walkthrough video from us
Google Ads is available on top of any of these if you want to buy traffic while the organic side builds. We do not do Facebook ads or social management. On your social question from the call: keep posting three or four times a week, but the palm tree posts are hurting you. Google reads images now, and a Nebraska homeowner seeing Florida landscaping does not build trust. If you go with a monthly package we write those to match your market.
What I would do if this were my business
Market Coverage at $5,000, then Grow at $997 a month. Not Foundation, because $2,000 more buys the pricing page, the city pages and the warranty page, and those are the pages that actually move permanent and landscape. Not the $2,500 plan on day one, because you should make me prove it first.
The math on whether this is worth it
Your closest competitor publishes $1,500 to $4,500 for a permanent lighting install. Call the middle of that $3,000 a job. Move the slider and see how many extra jobs a month it takes for this to pay for itself.
Assumes $3,000 per job, the midpoint of TruLight's published range for the Omaha market. Year one cost is the $5,000 site plus twelve months at $997. This is arithmetic on a stated job value, not a projection of results. I am not going to hand you a traffic forecast I cannot back up.
One extra job a month clears it. One job a quarter roughly covers the monthly fee on its own. That is the honest break even, and it is low because your average ticket is high. This math would look very different for a company selling $200 jobs.
You don't have to solve this before you start
You asked whether a standalone site would just compete with the Scorpion page. Fair question, and I want to give you a better answer than I did on the call. You do not have to cancel anything to begin. Here is the order I would actually run it in.
- Check one thing in your agreement. Whether you can run an independent site under the Blingle name. That is the only real gate, and as a founder you likely can. Everything else we sequence around.
- Build the new site while Scorpion stays live. Nothing changes for you during the build. No gap, no downtime, no risk. The Scorpion page keeps doing whatever it is doing.
- Point your Google profile at the new site. This is the single biggest lever and it is already yours. Your Google profile drives the map pack, and the map pack drives the calls. Changing the website field takes about a minute.
- Let both run. The Scorpion page becomes what it should have been all along, a franchise directory listing. The new site becomes the one that ranks. They do not cancel each other out because the new one has original content and your Google profile pointing at it.
- Decide on Scorpion when you have data, not before. Ninety days in you will be able to see which one is producing. Then it is a business decision with numbers behind it instead of a guess.
- We tie into Scorpion either way. You use it to run the business, so we make sure the data still flows. We are not asking you to give anything up.
The point is that the thing blocking you right now, waiting on the home office, does not have to block you. You can start the build and have the conversation with them in parallel.
Why the calendar matters more than usual here
Most of my clients could start any month and it would not change much. Yours is different, because 75% of your revenue books in a window.
Build and publish
Site goes live. Google profile repointed. First content published while nobody is searching for holiday lighting yet. This is the quiet work that has to happen before the season, not during it.
The holiday window
Homeowners start searching. Content published in August is old enough to rank by now. You show up for the season that pays for the year, on a site you own.
Permanent and landscape
Holiday work winds down, and the permanent lighting content built through the fall starts pulling. This is the category you said you want to grow, and it books year round.
Content takes about 90 days to start ranking. That is not a sales line, it is just how long Google takes to trust something new. Start in August and you are visible for the holiday season. Start in October and you are visible in January, after the season that matters most to you has already closed.
I am not going to pretend there is a deadline here that does not exist. You can start in the spring and it will still work. It just means the first holiday season runs on the old setup.
People ask for Pepsi by name. That is the whole product.
Two things I need from you, then we can get started
Two things, and neither takes long.
- Check the agreement question. Can you run an independent site under the Blingle name? You said you would talk to the home office. That is the one answer that unblocks everything.
- Tell me which option fits. Foundation at $3,000, Market Coverage at $5,000, or both markets at $8,500. If you are unsure, Market Coverage is the one I would pick.
If the franchise says no to an independent site, tell me and I will be straight with you: there is not much I can do inside the Scorpion setup, and I would rather say that than take your money and fight a losing battle. If they say yes, we can have the site live inside a few weeks.
Either way I meant what I said about the Google profile. Fix the duplicate posts, answer the last few reviews, keep the review push going. That works whether you hire us or not.
Any questions on any of this, just text me. I would rather answer them now than have you sit on this trying to work it out from a document.
Text me back and tell me what the home office said
Just reply to this message. If anything in here needs explaining, or you want to talk through which option fits, send that over and I will give you a straight answer.