Resources · Glossary
Home services marketing glossary
Forty terms you will meet when somebody tries to sell you marketing, defined in plain language and specifically for a business that sends a van to a house.
- No lock-in contracts
- Month to month after the first 90 days
- You own every account and asset
- Reported in booked jobs, not impressions
In short
What do home services marketing terms actually mean?
This glossary defines the terms a contractor meets when buying marketing — map pack, cost per booked job, negative keyword, Local Services Ads, speed to lead, attribution, EEAT and around forty others — in plain language, with what each one means specifically for a business that sends a van to a house rather than for an e-commerce shop.
Why this exists
A great deal of marketing jargon exists to make simple things sound difficult, and a contractor being quoted £2,000 a month deserves to understand what is being sold. Every definition below says what the term means and why it matters to a trade business specifically.
If a term you have been quoted is not here, ask us and we will add it.
The terms
Map pack
The block of three local business listings with a map that appears above the normal search results. For urgent home services searches it takes the majority of the clicks, and it is decided by relevance, distance and prominence rather than by your website.
Google Business Profile
The free listing that puts a business in the map pack and in Google Maps. For a trade business it is the single highest-return marketing asset available, and completing it fully costs nothing but an afternoon.
Local SEO
Search optimisation aimed at appearing for searches with local intent, such as “emergency plumber near me”. It is driven mainly by the Google Business Profile, reviews and location-specific pages rather than by the technical work that matters for national sites.
Cost per booked job
Total marketing spend, including agency fees, divided by the number of jobs actually booked. The only marketing number that decides whether a channel made money. Most agencies report cost per lead instead, which excludes the half of the funnel the contractor controls.
Cost per lead (CPL)
What it costs to generate one enquiry. The current Home & Home Improvement average is $90.92. Useful, but incomplete: an enquiry is not revenue until it is quoted and won.
Cost per click (CPC)
What you pay each time somebody clicks your advertisement. The Home & Home Improvement average is $8.33, against $5.42 across all industries.
Conversion rate
The share of clicks that become an enquiry. The Home & Home Improvement average is 8.05 per cent, meaning roughly twelve clicks per enquiry at the benchmark.
Negative keyword
A term you tell Google never to show your ads for. Adding “jobs”, “salary”, “courses” and “DIY” is usually the highest-return hour available in a contractor's advertising account.
Search terms report
The list of what people actually typed before seeing your ad, as opposed to the keywords you chose. Reading it weekly and adding negatives is where most wasted advertising spend is recovered.
Broad match
A keyword setting that lets Google show your ad for loosely related searches. Powerful with a mature negative keyword list and conversion tracking; the fastest way to waste a budget without them.
Local Services Ads
Google's pay-per-lead advertising format for local trades, displayed above the normal search ads with a Google Guaranteed badge. Billed per lead rather than per click, with a process for disputing leads that are not genuine. Availability varies by country and trade.
Google Guaranteed
A badge shown on Local Services Ads for businesses that have passed Google's licence and insurance checks. It signals verification to homeowners and sits above every other result on the page.
Call tracking
Assigning trackable phone numbers so each call can be attributed to the campaign, keyword or page that produced it. Since most home services enquiries are calls, an account without it is optimising blind.
Dynamic number insertion
The mechanism that swaps the phone number shown on a website depending on how the visitor arrived, so calls can be attributed without the visitor noticing anything.
Conversion tracking
Recording which advertising interactions led to an enquiry, so automated bidding can pursue the ones that work. Without it, bidding algorithms optimise towards whatever is easiest to measure rather than what makes money.
Conversion value
A monetary weight attached to different conversion types, so a boiler installation enquiry counts for more than a tap washer. Weighting conversions is how you make an algorithm chase margin instead of volume.
Attribution
Working out which marketing touchpoint deserves credit for a job. Home services buyers frequently see an ad, search the brand later and then call from the map pack, which is why single-channel reporting overstates some channels and hides others.
Speed to lead
The time between an enquiry arriving and a human speaking to the person who sent it. In a trade where a homeowner contacts three firms at once, it decides a large share of outcomes and costs nothing to improve.
Exclusive leads
Enquiries generated on the contractor's own domain and advertising accounts, sent to that business alone. More work to build, but it becomes an asset the business owns.
Service page
A page dedicated to one service, named the way customers search for it. One page per service outranks and outconverts a single page listing everything, because it can answer the specific question.
Service area page
A page targeting one town or district you cover. Genuinely useful when it contains real local detail; penalised when it is one template with the place name swapped across two hundred URLs.
Schema markup
Structured data added to a page in a format search engines and AI assistants read directly, describing what a business is, what it offers and where it operates. It does not change what a visitor sees.
LocalBusiness schema
The structured data type describing a physical or service-area business: name, address, phone, opening hours, service area and services. It helps machines read a business correctly rather than inferring it.
FAQ schema
Structured data marking up questions and answers on a page so search engines and AI assistants can extract them directly. One of the most useful markup types for a service business.
Core Web Vitals
Google's measures of loading speed, interactivity and visual stability. They matter most on mobile, which is where almost every urgent home services search happens.
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — the qualities Google's quality guidelines describe raters looking for. For a trade business this means real credentials, real photographs of real jobs, and honest information about cost.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)
Structuring content so that answer engines — AI assistants and featured snippets — can lift a direct, correct answer from it. In practice: answer the question plainly near the top, use question-shaped headings, and mark it up.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)
Optimising to be cited by generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews. Research from Princeton found that adding statistics, citing sources and including attributed quotations raise citation rates substantially, while keyword stuffing performs worse than doing nothing.
AI Overview
The AI-generated summary Google places above search results for many queries. It answers the question in place, so being cited inside it increasingly matters more than ranking beneath it.
Citation (local SEO)
A mention of a business's name, address and phone number on another website or directory. Consistency across them supports map pack rankings; inconsistency quietly suppresses them.
NAP consistency
Keeping name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear. Variations — “Street” against “St”, an old number left on a directory — confuse the signals that decide local ranking.
Retargeting
Advertising to people who have already visited your website. For planned home services work it is usually the cheapest enquiry available, and most contractors never set it up.
Lead form (Meta)
An advertisement format where the enquiry is completed inside Facebook or Instagram rather than on a website. Higher volume, lower intent; qualifying questions and a fast callback are what make the difference.
Landing page
A page built for one campaign and one message, with the phone number visible without scrolling and no navigation to wander into. Sending advertising traffic to a homepage instead is the most common and most expensive mistake in contractor advertising.
Bounce
A visit where somebody arrives and leaves without acting. On a trade site it usually means the page did not answer the question fast enough or did not load quickly enough on a phone.
Maintenance plan
A recurring agreement, common in HVAC and pest control, where the customer pays monthly or annually for scheduled service. Worth several times a one-off job over its lifetime and dramatically cheaper to sell to again.
Seasonality
The predictable pattern of demand across a year. Heating peaks with the first cold, wasps in late summer, landscaping enquiries in late winter for spring work. Flat annual budgets lose money in every trade with a season.
Gross profit per job
Invoice value minus materials, labour and travel. It is the number that sets the ceiling on what an enquiry can cost, and most marketing arguments become simple once it is known.
Retainer
A fixed monthly agency fee, as distinct from a percentage of advertising spend. A flat retainer keeps the agency's incentive on results rather than on persuading you to spend more.
Foundation period
An agreed initial term — 90 days at Leadwise — during which tracking, technical and content work is completed. Judging search performance sooner than that is judging noise.
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