Choosing a marketing agency for contractors

Agencies with a verified published price

How to hire a contractor marketing agency

1. Name the job you want more of. Full replacements, insurance work, small repairs and maintenance contracts are different searches with different values and different competitors. An agency that does not ask which one you are short of will optimise for whichever is easiest to show on a chart.
2. Insist on call tracking from day one. Most contractor enquiries arrive by phone, so a report that counts form fills is counting a minority of the business. Ask how calls are attributed, who owns the tracking numbers, and whether missed calls appear in the reporting rather than disappearing quietly.
3. Check the local search work is real. Google orders local results on relevance, distance and prominence and states there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Ask which of those the agency is working on and what it will do weekly, not what platform it licenses.
4. Read the review programme carefully. Google's Business Profile policies prohibit paid reviews and prohibit incentives offered in exchange for posting a review or removing a negative one, while permitting genuine reviews solicited without incentives. An agency selling review gating is selling you its risk.
5. Verify the agency against its own pages. Published address, named team, printed prices, and case detail that names the client and the trade. Agencies appear in this index only on what can be verified from their own published pages, and applying the same test to a shortlist takes an afternoon.

What actually produces contractor enquiries

The map result does most of the work in most trades, because homeowners searching for a contractor are searching locally and often urgently. Google names relevance, distance and prominence as the three factors behind local results, and recommends verifying the business, keeping information such as address, hours, category and attributes current, responding to reviews and adding photos. None of that is glamorous and all of it is checkable, which makes it a good test of whether an agency is doing weekly work or monthly reporting.

The website's job is narrower than most proposals suggest. It has to load on a phone, say what you do and where, show real projects, and make calling effortless. Service pages that describe the actual jobs you take, with real photos and honest ranges, outperform a redesign in almost every case, and they cost less.

The tactics that create risk rather than jobs

The first is the town-page matrix: a landing page for every community within fifty miles, differing only in the place name. Google's spam policies describe doorway abuse as pages created to rank for specific, similar queries that lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful, and describe scaled content abuse as many pages generated primarily to manipulate rankings rather than help users. Google states that sites violating the policies may rank lower in results or not appear at all, which is a poor trade for a contractor whose visibility is the business.

The second is review manipulation. Google's Business Profile policies prohibit reviews or ratings paid for directly or in kind and prohibit offering incentives such as payment, discounts or free goods in exchange for posting a review or removing a negative one, while explicitly permitting the solicitation of content that represents a genuine experience without incentives. The FTC's endorsement guidance takes the same line and adds that delaying the posting only of negative reviews, even by a few days, creates a biased picture. Ask to see the review request wording before it goes out under your name.

The third is a guarantee. Google states that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking, so a guaranteed position or a guaranteed number of leads is a promise the platform contradicts. Where an agency genuinely sells leads rather than marketing, that is a different product with different economics, and it should be priced and reported as such rather than blended into a retainer.

Contract terms worth arguing about

Ownership first. The website, the domain, the content, the Business Profile, the analytics and the call tracking numbers should each have a named owner in the contract. Tracking numbers are the one contractors most often lose, and losing them means losing the number printed on trucks, invoices and yard signs.

Then reporting. Agree that calls and booked estimates are the headline, that reporting compares the same period last year rather than last month, and that the monthly report lists the pages published or changed. Seasonality makes month-on-month movement meaningless in most trades, and a list of published work is the cheapest audit available to you.

Finally, term and pause. Trades have quiet seasons and cash-flow troughs. Ask what the agreement does when you pause, what happens to rankings and profile work during the pause, and what the notice period actually costs. An agency that has served contractors before will have thought about this already.

Questions people actually ask

What should a contractor marketing agency be measured on?

Calls and booked estimates attributed to search, split by job type and compared with the same period last year. Sessions and impressions move with the season and give credit for demand that would have arrived anyway.

Do I need a page for every town I serve?

Only where each page carries genuinely different information: real crews, real projects, real service times. Near-identical pages differing by place name match Google's description of doorway abuse, and sites that violate the spam policies may rank lower or not appear in results at all.

Can I offer customers a discount for a review?

No. Google's Business Profile policies prohibit offering incentives such as payment, discounts or free goods in exchange for posting a review. You may ask customers for genuine reviews without an incentive, and that is the version that survives both a platform audit and FTC scrutiny.

Who should own my call tracking numbers?

You should, and it belongs in the contract. Numbers printed on trucks, signs and invoices are expensive to change, and an agency holding them holds leverage that has nothing to do with the quality of its work.

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