Resources
Free resources for home service businesses
Practical guides you can act on without hiring anyone. No email gate, no drip sequence, no pretending a two-page PDF is a masterclass.
- 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 should a contractor do first to get more work online?
Work out the gross profit on an average job, because that number sets the ceiling on what an enquiry can cost. Then measure how long it takes to answer one. Then complete the Google Business Profile and ask every customer for a review. Only after those four things is paid advertising measurable rather than a donation.
Why we give this away
Because most of what a home service business needs to do in its first year of marketing is not complicated, it is just unglamorous and nobody explains it plainly. Claiming your Google Business Profile properly, adding negative keywords, answering the phone faster, asking every customer for a review. None of that needs an agency.
If you read these and do it yourself, good. If you read them and decide you would rather not spend your evenings on it, you will know we understand the work before you have paid us a penny.
The order to do things in
If you are doing your own marketing, this is the sequence. Each stage is worth more than the one after it, and doing them out of order is why most contractors conclude that marketing does not work.
Find out what a job is worth
Average invoice, minus materials, minus labour, minus the drive. That gross profit figure is the ceiling on what an enquiry can cost you. Until you know it, every marketing decision is a guess and every agency quote is unanswerable. This takes an hour with your last twenty invoices.
Fix how you answer
Time an enquiry from arrival to a human speaking to the customer. If it is over an hour, stop reading and fix that. No campaign we could build returns as much as halving that number, and it costs nothing.
Finish your Google Business Profile
Every category, every service listed individually, service areas, photographs, and the Q&A section. Free, takes an afternoon, and it is the single highest-return asset a local trade owns. Most profiles in your market are half-empty.
Ask every customer for a review
Same day, direct link, every single job. Recency counts as much as volume in the map pack. This one habit outperforms most paid work and compounds for years.
Build one page per service
Not one page listing all your services. One page each, named the way customers search, with a phone number visible without scrolling and honest guidance on cost.
Only now, spend money on ads
With tracking in place, a known job value and a phone that gets answered, paid advertising becomes measurable. Without those four, it is a donation. This is the stage most contractors start at, which is why it so often disappoints them.
Things that are not worth your money yet
Asked often enough that it is worth saying plainly.
- Buying shared leads. The same homeowner sold to four firms is a race to the bottom you did not choose to enter. Fix your own map pack first — it is free.
- A full website rebuild, usually. Most trade sites do not need rebuilding. They need a phone number above the fold, faster loading on mobile, and one proper page per service.
- Posting daily on social media. For most trades this is effort with no measurable return. Photographing your finished jobs is worth doing; posting them every day is not.
- Printed leaflets before your Google presence is right. A leaflet sends people to search your name. If what they find is a half-empty profile with four old reviews, you have paid to lose the job.
- Anyone guaranteeing page one. Nobody controls Google's index. A guarantee of rankings is either meaningless small print or a lie.
Browse by topic
Blog
Practical posts on winning more work in the trades. Written for owners, not for marketers.
SEO Resources
Local SEO, Google Business Profile, service pages and the technical basics that actually move the map pack.
Google Ads Resources
Account structure, negative keywords, call tracking, Local Services Ads and budget planning by season.
Lead Generation Resources
Landing pages, speed to lead, follow-up sequences, review generation and tracking a booked job properly.
Find out what is costing you jobs
We record a walkthrough of your site and your Google Business Profile, name the three competitors outranking you, and rank the fixes by what they are worth. Free, and yours whether you hire us or not.
Request your free audit