ZCT Zucchet has been clearing rats, pigeons and woodworm out of Roman homes, hospitals and restaurants since 1947, in a city where several other companies trade under the same name. Midsummer Agency runs its search advertising, SEO, website and tracking, and every channel now reports back in quotes sent and jobs won.
PPCSEOCROAnalytics
ZCT Zucchet is a pest control company based in Rome. It covers a radius of 100 to 120 km around the city, most of Lazio, and takes larger contracts for public and private organizations well beyond the region. The core of the business is 3 pests, woodworm, pigeons and rats, alongside the long tail of everything else that crawls, bites or nests, treated with traditional methods and newer, more advanced systems. Its Eco Zucchet line offers ecological treatments for customers who want the problem gone without the harsh chemistry.
The account has 3 quirks that make it harder than it looks.
We started on Google Ads, and the account has picked up a channel at a time ever since.
ZCT came to us with 2 goals. The first was more leads, and better ones, through the 2 channels the business runs on: phone calls and the contact form. The second was a tracking system that could say which service each lead actually wanted, so the budget could follow what the technicians had capacity for and what the season was bringing in.
The Google Ads account was built for an earlier stage of the business, with every pest sharing the same budget and the same message. Rats, wasps, pigeons and cockroaches all got the same space, so there was room to speak to each one directly. Someone with pigeons nesting on the balcony wants to read about pigeons.
Leads were measured as calls to the toll-free number, so the next layer of insight was still to come: which calls turned into a quote, which quotes turned into a job, and which searches started it all.
The website had room to grow too.
Then there is the name. “Zucchet” is ZCT’s main trademark and its most valuable search term, and competitors and namesakes all bid for the top spot on it, which makes it one of the most expensive clicks in the account.
We started on Google Ads, added Local Services Ads at the client’s request and then Microsoft Ads. SEO came next, then a full Website Redesign, and most recently the account moved into ChatGPT Ads. Call tracking and GA4 run underneath all of it, and they are what the budget decisions rest on.
ServicesGoogle Ads · Microsoft Ads · Local Services Ads · ChatGPT Ads
We opened with an analysis of competitors and services to find where the market was winnable, then rebuilt the account into fewer, tidier campaigns organized by pest, pointing at landing pages designed for ZCT’s favorite outcome, a direct phone call.
We rewrote the headlines and descriptions pest by pest, so a search about woodworm lands on an ad about woodworm, from a company that clearly treats it for a living. Every campaign that matters now carries its own ad extensions too, specific to the treatment it sells.
Once the call tracking showed what each lead was worth, 3 pests stood clear of the rest. Woodworm, pigeons and rats bring in roughly twice the average job value, so we pulled them into campaigns of their own, with their own budgets and their own targets.
Urgency differs from pest to pest as well. A wasp nest needs someone today. A pigeon problem can sit through weeks of deciding and a couple of quotes before anyone signs. Separate campaigns let each one bid for the buyer it actually has.
The same data settled the question of the brand term. We keep ZCT at the top for “Zucchet”, however expensive the click gets, because it turns out to be one of the most profitable keywords in the account.
We also read the account over the year, not month by month. A lot of ZCT’s jobs come back: a business treated this year books again next year, and quotes sent in spring get accepted in autumn. A target that looks too high in a single month can be exactly right across 12, so we hold areas that a short-term read would have cut.
Local Services Ads are Google’s pay-per-lead listings for emergency trades such as plumbers, drain clearance and pest control. They sit above the organic results for searches like “pest control near me”, “pest control Rome” or the name of a town in the province, such as Tivoli. The people clicking them want to call someone now.
Leads there cost less than on Google Ads or Microsoft Ads, and they follow the same season, which runs from spring to autumn. They keep calls coming in through the winter, when demand everywhere else goes quiet.
The same structure runs on Microsoft Ads, on a smaller budget.
We have now launched a 6-month ChatGPT Ads test. It runs a campaign for each of the 3 high-value pests, a broader brand campaign on pest control in general, and a line for the B2B side, since care homes and hospitals have to treat on a regulated schedule.
The target is the moment someone discovers they have a problem and asks ChatGPT what to do about it, before they get as far as asking who to call. We give OpenAI’s system the conversational contexts to appear in, as specific as we can make them, and write the headline, description and image for each pest.
ServicesTechnical SEO · On-Page Optimization · Content & Copywriting · Off-Page & Link Building · Local SEO
We started with an audit and fixed the structure first. Every page got its own meta title and description, the pest pages got a proper heading hierarchy and content written for the pest they cover, and structured data went in across the site. We added new pages for specific pests and for neighborhoods within Rome, then linked them together so the services and the blog feed each other.
Every pest has a pillar post built on its highest-volume search, such as how to get rid of woodworm, linking out to a cluster of shorter posts on the same pest and taking links back from each of them. Someone reading up on a pest usually has one in the house, and a well-placed link takes them straight to the service page that solves it.
We went deep into the keyword research. Whenever a secondary keyword on one article carried real volume of its own, several hundred searches a month, we gave it an article of its own, shorter and linked back to the pillar. Between the pillars and the spin-offs, the blog now covers nearly every question people ask about the pests ZCT treats.
The latest round goes the other way, into technical posts on each treatment ZCT offers, explaining how the work is actually done and linking straight to the matching service page. Drafts come out of an AI workflow we built in Make on top of Google Sheets, then get our edit before anything goes live.
The gains showed up 2 to 3 months after the first posts went out, and 3 of the site’s top 5 traffic pages are now blog posts.
We grew the site’s authority with paid placements, going from 6 acquired links in a year to 20. Every site on a publishing partner’s list went through Semrush one at a time before we spent anything on it. We checked 4 things.
The final mix pairs national titles with smaller sites where pest control fits naturally, such as home care blogs. The client asked for specific national titles, and ZCT now appears in la Repubblica and Adnkronos and links to those mentions from its own site.
ServicesUX & Design · Web Development
We rebuilt the site from scratch and moved it off WordPress onto a headless setup built with Astro, hosted on Vercel. Astro serves every page as fast, lightweight static HTML, with no theme or plugin layer slowing it down. The work started with research into well-structured sites, Italian and international, to work out how each page should be laid out. We then wireframed every page type in Figma: home, pest pages, business services, contact and blog.
We built it with AI coding tools, Antigravity and Claude Code, adjusting as we went wherever the build showed us something better than the wireframe. Desktop came first, then mobile, then the interactive elements that make it easier to use. After launch we cleaned up the remaining bugs within a few weeks.
The work followed conversion best practice for emergency services.
Thanks to the headless build, Core Web Vitals now sit close to 100 on both mobile and desktop, and the site is noticeably faster than the one it replaced. Google Ads conversion rate is up 20% year on year since launch, on a lot more traffic, which is usually when conversion rate slips.
ServicesGoogle Analytics 4 · Google Tag Manager · WhatConverts · Looker Studio
We set up a custom GA4 implementation through Google Tag Manager, with tracking events that sort demand into types of intervention. That gave us better audiences for the campaigns and a clear picture of what people were asking for. A custom dashboard puts the website data next to the call center’s own statistics, so ZCT can see demand by service against the budget behind it.
WhatConverts was the biggest step forward in the account. It ties every call back to the campaign, ad group and keyword that produced it, then follows it on to the quotes sent and the jobs sold.
We then connected WhatConverts to Google Ads, so the quote value and sales value of every lead flow back into the ad account. Google Ads now shows, campaign by campaign, the value of the quotes and the sales each one produced, and we use those numbers to decide where the budget goes.
We stopped judging the account on call volume and started judging it on revenue. That is how the 3 high-value pests surfaced, how we know the brand term earns its price, and how we can see what Local Services Ads brings in on a much smaller budget than Google Ads or Microsoft Ads.
The Google Ads restructure quadrupled conversions, measured from lead to closed contract, and cut the cost per acquisition by 77%. At peak times, calls came in faster than the call center could answer them. Local Services Ads added more leads on top at a cost per acquisition 5 times lower than the other placements, along with a stream of positive customer reviews.
Since the new site went live, compared with the same period a year earlier, organic search moved in the right direction: impressions are up 46%, and the average position rose from 14.3 to 9.
In a recent 28-day period, sessions were up 51% year on year and conversions up 150%.
The blog has started turning up in AI answers too. Semrush finds ZCT’s posts cited in Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode and in ChatGPT, led by the post on ant bites, which appears across 32 different prompts, and the guide to catching a mouse at home.
All the guys we spoke to are prepared, understanding of our needs, and willing to improve performances. Their organization is light, smart, and rational. No wasted time, straight to the goal.
The CEO
ZCT Zucchet
Mark
Pay Per Click · SEO
Built the account up channel by channel, from the per-pest Google Ads structure to the tracking, and led the rebuild of the site.
Dario
PPC Manager
Runs Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Local Services Ads and the ChatGPT Ads test.
Sofia
SEO
Runs the SEO: the pillar posts and their clusters, the treatment posts and the links from the national press.
Ecommerce plus physical stores? B2B and B2C under one roof? One market or eleven? The businesses other agencies find too complex are the ones we make shine.
