Marketing questions contractors actually ask

Work backwards from gross profit per job rather than from a percentage of turnover. If an average job produces £400 in gross profit and one enquiry in three books, you can afford roughly £130 per enquiry before breaking even. At the current Home & Home Improvement benchmark of $90.92 per lead, that leaves room. If your average job produces £80, paid search is probably the wrong channel.

Expect movement in the map pack from around month three and meaningful organic enquiry volume between months six and nine. A brand new domain takes longer. Google states that local results are based on relevance, distance and prominence, and prominence in particular is earned over time rather than switched on.

No. Google's own documentation states plainly that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Any agency guaranteeing a position is either relying on meaningless small print or misleading you.

They answer different problems. Google Ads can produce an enquiry within a week because you are buying attention that already exists. SEO is slower but keeps producing enquiries at no marginal cost per click once it lands. For most home service businesses the right answer is both: ads to pay the bills this quarter, search to lower the blended cost per lead over two years.

For planned, visual, higher-value work — roofs, bathrooms, landscaping, extensions, heat pumps — yes, and often at a lower cost per booked job than Google because click prices are a fraction. For genuine emergencies, no. Nobody with water coming through the ceiling opens Instagram.

Usually three causes: no qualifying questions in the form, an offer that attracts browsers rather than buyers, and a callback that takes hours. A Meta lead has not raised their hand as urgently as somebody typing “emergency electrician”, so the form and the follow-up have to do the filtering.

Only as a stopgap. Those platforms sell the same homeowner to three or four contractors at once, which turns every enquiry into a race on price and speed you did not agree to enter. It also means your enquiry flow lives on somebody else's platform at their prices.

Within five minutes to a human, and within a minute for an automated acknowledgement. When a homeowner has contacted three firms, the one that answers first wins a disproportionate share. This single habit outperforms most paid marketing changes and costs nothing.

Complete your Google Business Profile properly — correct primary category, every service listed individually, accurate service areas, regular photographs, and the Q&A section almost nobody uses — then ask every customer for a review on the day you finish the job.

Enough, and recent. Survey data from BrightLocal found 71 per cent of consumers will not consider a business rated below three stars, 59 per cent expect between 20 and 99 reviews, and 27 per cent expect to see reviews from the past fortnight. Recency matters as much as volume.

Yes, to all of them. In the same survey, 88 per cent of consumers said they would use a business that responds to all reviews, against 47 per cent for one that does not, and 93 per cent expect a response to their own.

Publish ranges with the variables explained. “A typical three-bedroom re-roof runs between X and Y depending on tiles, scaffolding and structural condition” wins trust and filters out enquiries you were never going to convert. Firms that refuse to discuss cost are the ones homeowners quietly distrust.

It varies enormously. Established specialists in this sector publish from around $2,800 a month for local SEO and often decline businesses under three million dollars in revenue. Leadwise publishes £795 / $995 for SEO, £595 / $745 for a single ad platform, and £1,495 / $1,895 for all three, with advertising spend separate.

You should, without exception. Every advertising account, analytics property and tracking number should be created in your business name. An agency that holds them in its own name is holding your marketing history as leverage, and you will lose it the day you leave.

Twelve months is common and rarely in the client's interest. A short initial period makes sense because search work takes about ninety days to land, but after that a monthly rolling arrangement keeps the agency honest. Leadwise uses a 90-day foundation period then 30 days' notice.

Ask four questions. Show me a live client account, not a report. Whose name is my ad account in? What is my cost per booked job? When would you tell me to spend less? The last one is the most revealing, and an agency paid a percentage of ad spend cannot answer it well.

In a single metropolitan area, £1,000 to £2,500 a month in Google Ads spend generates enough data to optimise honestly. Below roughly £750 a month the data arrives too slowly to draw conclusions, and any agency that takes the work anyway is charging you to guess.

The usual four causes are untracked phone calls, ads running when nobody answers, broad match without a negative keyword list, and traffic landing on a homepage instead of a page matching the search. All four are fixable within a month.

Usually not. Most trade websites need a phone number visible without scrolling, faster loading on mobile, and one properly built page per service. A full rebuild is a large expense that frequently changes none of the things that were actually losing the work.

The map pack is the block of three local businesses shown with a map above the normal results. For urgent searches it takes most of the clicks and is decided by relevance, distance and prominence rather than by your website's design.

Partly. The map pack weights physical proximity heavily, so ranking in a town twenty miles away is genuinely hard. Organic service-area pages can rank there and often do. An honest agency will tell you which of your target towns are realistic before taking any money.

Not for the local map pack, which is driven by your profile, reviews and service pages. It does help you win cost and comparison searches, which is a separate and worthwhile job — “how much does a new boiler cost” is searched far more than any brand name in the sector.

Answer Engine Optimisation means structuring content so AI assistants and featured snippets can lift a direct answer from it. It matters increasingly, because a growing share of “who should I call” questions are answered before anyone reaches a list of links.

Answer questions plainly and early on the page, publish specific figures rather than vague claims, cite your sources, and mark the page up with structured data. Research from Princeton found that adding statistics and citing sources substantially increases how often generative engines cite a page, while keyword stuffing performs worse than doing nothing at all.

For most home service businesses, no. Blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot and similar crawlers removes you from the systems increasingly answering “find me a plumber in…” questions. There are good reasons for a publisher to block them; there are very few for a local trade business.

Before, during and after, from the same position, in landscape. Two minutes per job. For visual trades — roofing, landscaping, remodelling, garage doors — the photograph library is worth more than any other single marketing input, and most firms have never built one.

Different pages, different campaigns, different language. Commercial buyers search for compliance, certification, response times and insurance, not for “electrician near me”. Trying to serve both audiences on one page usually wins neither.

When you are consistently quoting at capacity and winning most of what you quote. Generating more enquiries you cannot service damages your reviews and your reputation. Sometimes the honest answer is to raise prices first and market afterwards.

£795 / $995 a month for SEO, £595 / $745 for Google Ads or Meta Ads management, £1,495 / $1,895 for all three combined. Advertising spend is separate and paid directly to the platforms. There is a 90-day foundation period, then 30 days' notice, and every account is created in your name.

For this work, no. Search and advertising platforms are the same interfaces wherever the operator sits. What matters is whether they understand your trade and your market and are available when you need them. Ask for the free audit and judge that in fifteen minutes at no cost.