Google Ads FAQ | Home Services Marketing

1. How do I begin with Home Services Marketing?

You begin by filling in the form or giving us a call. Once we have your info and have taken a look at your website, we will send you a link where you can book a discovery call with our CEO, Andrew. He will then meet with you by phone or on Zoom to ask you some questions. After, he has that info, he will use some tools to analyze your online presence and goals, and create an Online Growth Plan for your company. This is done complimentary and he will book a follow-up strategy meeting with you to go over it. If there is a fit, you will get a choice of some dates to start onboarding with us.
2. What steps are there to set up my marketing campaigns?

Everybody wants things to get up and running in a quick and efficient manner and we are no different. However, your first month with us is all about onboarding. During this month we will meet with you and get various forms filled out so that we can be aligned on your goals and resources to bring you online success and grow your business. Month one is about alignment, campaign set-up and your custom analytics report. Once we have all this in place, you will be in the capable hands of your account manager.
3. How quickly will I see results?

This depends on many factors, such as what phase of growth your company is in, how seasonal is your business and what time of year is it currently… There are also other important considerations like your budget, services, locations and competition. We ask that you work with us and give us three months to set everything up before we review performance. We are interested in long term partners and work very hard to make sure we bring you sustainable growth.
4. What services do you offer home services companies?
5. How do you tailor your services to different types of home services companies?

We work with a large variety of different home services / trades companies, such as landscapers, plumbers, electricians, HVAC, painters, drainage, waste removal, cleaners and more. The most important considerations when setting up campaigns is to set up realistic goals, budgets and metrics we can track on a monthly and long term basis. There are other big considerations such as whether you are targeting residential or commercial clients (typically it’s a mixture of both), whether your revenues are one-off projects or recurring (e.g. maintenance) and how that affects your LTV (life-time-value) of a customer.
6. Do you work with commercial trades companies?

Our core skill set of Google search engine marketing (PPC, SEO), lead generation and ROI analytics does lend itself best where homeowners are actively googling for residential home services.

They are more plentiful in number and actively searching on Google and can be convinced through your website content and online authority such as reviews and videos to reach out for a quote even if they don’t know you.

That doesn’t mean that a commercial trades company shouldn’t do PPC and SEO or focus on how they appear in Google and online.

It just means to calculate ROI we have to use LTV (life-time-value) metrics and when they find you on Google it is usually not as a cold lead, it is likely a search from someone who has heard of you or who has received a proposal or RFP from you.
7. How do you measure and report on return on investment?

One of our core brand facets is ‘flexibility’ – see here. This means we don’t dictate your company’s tech stack. We work with what you already have set up that fits your company. We then analyze this and add different components to it. For companies that work with us on the Home Services Marketing Program, we have the scope and resources to configure full revenue attribution for our marketing campaigns giving us accurate ROI data. For us to be able to do this, you need to have a CRM or sales platform where you record revenue data and tie it to lead data. We can also show you ways to set this up using our SZL platform. For all other companies that don’t have this set up, we use a proxy ROI calculator that calculates ROI based on custom assumed values for your company and services, such as your lead quality rate, lead conversion rate and average revenue / life-time-value amounts. See page 2 on this sample monthly marketing report for specific details.
8. What are your fees and how much should I spend on marketing?

For landscaping companies under one million dollars in annual revenue we start you off on the Google Ads Management Program. Costs for this start at $750 per month for our management fees and we recommend a monthly budget of at least $750 per month on average, which depending on the season will go up and down. Our typical fees for the full-service Home Services Marketing Program are between $2,000 and $3,000 Canadian dollars per month depending on the size and scope of your company. In terms of what you should spend on marketing, this depends on how agreesive you want to be with your growth goals. A typical rule of thumb is to spend 5-10% of your revenues on sales and marketing but what you include in those costs can vary but does normally include digital marketing costs. However, we can help you more accurately calculate what you need to spend on marketing by reverse engineering your goals based on your historical performance, average revenue values and how much of your revenues are recurring versus one-and-done. Our co-founder, Ira, has written a guide on this. Please reach out to schedule a discovery call for an accurate quote and to receive your complimentary custom Online Growth Plan
9. Are there any long-term contracts or commitments required?

We don’t believe in holding any client of ours hostage. We don’t have long term contracts but go month-to-month. It takes a lot of work to onboard and set things up so we ask that you give us three months before we review performance and results together. All of the data and analytics platforms we set up are yours, such as Google Ads and Google Analytics. Based on seasonality, we can customize your plan so that you can stay with us throughout the quieter winter months depending on your company. This way nearly all of our landscapers stick with us year-round.
10. What kind of support will I receive during the campaign?

Communication is a big advantage of working with our team. We are are a team of digital marketing experts and each one of us will communicate what we are working on and how it affects you. You also get a dedicated account manager for your Google Ads and if you are a full-service marketing program client, an account strategist who will meet with you every month to go over results, analysis and recommendations.
11. Do you offer any resources or training for my team?
12. How does your lead generation and tracking system work?

We have a team of specialists who will set up your custom analytics report that includes advanced lead tracking. We track leads from all your online sources through your website, ads and Google Business Profile. In addition, we will use call tracking so we can track which sources are bringing you your most important new customer calls. Our sample monthly marketing report shows you how we present and report on the lead data.
13. What kind of website management and updates do you provide?

We have a robust system of website maintenance and updates for WordPress sites in order to keep them safe from hacking and security vulnerabilities. We include our managed hosting program for all full-service marketing program clients. See here for more details.
14. Can you share examples of home services companies you’ve helped?
15. What have been some notable success stories?

During two years working with Earthscape Landscapes their Copper CRM system reported directly attributable revenue of over $4 million to our Google Ads and SEO campaigns. This brought an ROI of 35:1 for these two years of our Landscaper Marketing Program. In addition, for Great Canadian Landscaping, our campaigns bring in over a million dollars worth of leads in peak months on their website. We have also created an SEO satellite strategy for them that enables them to rank on the top page of Google in their most in-demand service areas. We have also been providing success for R&B Plumbing with an average of 241 leads per month through our Google campaigns in our more than three years working with them.
16. How do you improve local SEO for home services companies?

SEO has many different facets, including on-page, off-page and technical. For on-page, we optimize your website content to ensure it is using the best practices to rank it well for your target keywords in your service locations. We build landing pages on your main website that are specific to your locations and services. For off-page, we help build authority by doing local citations that involves an extensive configuration of your Google Business Profile that is then used to push to other business directories. This builds backlinks and helps your site gain in authority. Google Business Profile is essential for local SEO and we publish content and update it monthly, as well as give you tips on how to respond to reviews. For technical SEO, we fix all crawl and link errors and provide you with a score on your monthly report about your technical website health. Our goal is to keep this above 95% every month. In order to do this we have to continually monitor and fix any issues.
17. What strategies do you use to enhance online visibility?
18. Can you show me an example report?
19. Do you provide social media marketing?

If you join our Home Services Marketing Program, our Account Strategist will provide tips and recommendations on what you should do for social media marketing. You can discuss your ideas and results in your monthly meeting. If you require more support, to create a content calendar, draft posts and publishing to your main platforms, we have a professional add-on service you can pay for on a monthly basis. Ask us for more details about this.
20. What are the main reasons for choosing to work with Home Services Marketing?

We are focussed on home services companies. We have various examples of success stories working with all types of trades companies: landscapers, electricians, plumbers, HVAC, and more. In addition, we are focused on Canada and get the culture and seasonality up here. If you are a Canadian home services company and want to increase your revenues, profit and impact, look no further than Home Services Marketing. Get your complimentary custom Online Growth Plan today.