Best-practice guides for contractors.

What contractor marketing really costs in 2026: agency fees, ad spend, cost per lead by trade, and the markups that quietly pad the bill. Sourced numbers, no pitch.

Cost per booked job is the only marketing number that pays the bills. How to calculate it, why almost no agency reports it, and how to start measuring it.

How to set a Google Ads budget that fits your shop: back into it from your lead goal and cost per lead, then sanity-check against 7 to 10 percent of revenue.

A fair agency fee is a slice of your marketing budget, not the whole thing. What to pay by revenue band, why a flat fee beats a cut of your ad spend.

The whole system an HVAC shop uses to generate its own leads: map pack, Local Services Ads, search, a site that converts, reviews, and seasonal timing. Sourced numbers.

The honest trade-off between buying contractor leads from Angi or HomeAdvisor and generating your own. How resellers work, when bought leads fit, and why owned ones compound.

Panel upgrades and EV chargers are high-ticket, growing, and most electricians never market them on purpose. Here is the 6-move playbook to win the high-intent searches.

Insulation has a marketing gift most shops underuse: the federal 25C tax credit that pays the homeowner back. Here is the 6-move playbook to turn it into booked jobs.

A roofing lead is the priciest in the trades, so the system has to convert. The five moves we run: map pack, high-intent and storm search, a site that handles photos and claims, and timing.

Local Services Ads vs. Google Ads for contractors: pay-per-lead with a badge or pay-per-click where you write the page. The real cost of each, where each one wins, and how to run them together.

The 8 setup steps most contractor Google Ads accounts skip on day one, from conversion tracking to negative keywords to owning the account. Each one is money you keep instead of leak.

How to set up Local Services Ads for a contractor and pass the screening: license, insurance, and background checks, the Google Verified badge, categories, budget, reviews, and disputing bad leads.

Is the Google Guaranteed badge (now Google Verified) worth it for contractors? Usually yes, but not for the reason most shops think, and there are real catches.

Local Services Ads in 2026: the badge change, reviews now run through your Business Profile, and the durable ranking factors to watch. What is real, what to ignore.

Your Google Ads get clicks but the phone never rings. The six usual culprits behind clicks that do not convert, and the plain fix for each one.

The exact 7 moves we run on every contractor Google Business Profile to win the map pack: categories, services, reviews, photos, posts, Q&A, and your site. No secrets held back.

Three Google Business Profile fixes a contractor can do in about an hour, with no budget and no agency: categories, photos, and the review ask.

The honest answer for contractors: sometimes. A real service-area page earns its keep, but fifty thin doorway pages with the town swapped will hurt you, not help.

The exact system we use to get contractors more Google reviews: how many you need, when to ask, the one-tap link, replying to every one, and the steady drip.

What actually decides who ranks in the Google Maps map pack for contractors: the three levers Google weighs, what you can move, and what you cannot.

Your contractor website has one job: turn a visit into a call. Here is how to tell if yours does it, the handful of things that decide it, and why tracking comes first.

A rebuild is slow and expensive, and most contractor sites need a fix, not a teardown. A plain decision framework for telling which one your site actually needs.

The 9 things that turn website visits into phone calls for a contractor: click-to-call, speed, mobile, trust signals, a clear offer, a short form, real photos, one CTA, and tracking.

A contractor's guide to telling whether your marketing agency is producing booked jobs or just busy reports. The signs it is working, the red flags, and the one question that settles it.

The same six-step marketing audit an agency would sell you, written out in full: Business Profile, map pack, site, tracking, ad accounts, and what you own.

Five questions to ask a contractor marketing agency before you sign: ownership, contract length, ad-spend markup, what the report leads with, and who does the work.

A monthly PDF full of impressions and clicks looks like value and proves nothing. Here is what a real contractor marketing report leads with, and what to ask for.

If your agency owns your Google Ads account, domain, or Business Profile, leaving means starting over. Which accounts you must own, why, and how to take them back.

The real 2026 home-services marketing numbers: cost per lead and cost per click by trade, LSA vs Search, and budget as a percent of revenue. Public data, named and dated.