Home Service Businesses: what the work produced

This page describes one engagement with a client. It shows where the business started, what we did, and what the client’s own records show afterward. It also says what we got wrong. The client is not named, and one business is not a forecast for yours.

The situation

Home service businesses share a pattern. Most customers call, and they call when something is broken, leaking or not cooling. They search on a phone, open two or three results, and ring the one that looks like it serves their area. A caller with a burst pipe tends to dial the next number on the list if the first one goes to voicemail.

That pattern decides what to measure. Rankings and traffic are inputs. Booked jobs are the output. So the starting question was not how many people visited the site. It was how many calls came in, which search or ad produced each one, and how many became paid jobs.

A ranking report is not enough here. A report can say the site moved up on a list of keywords and still tell you nothing about revenue. Keywords differ in value. A search for a named service in your city from someone ready to book is worth far more than a general search about how a system works. This is why we report calls and jobs, and show rankings only as supporting detail.

What we found

Before changing anything we checked four things, because each one can hide the real cause of a weak result.

Tracking

We checked whether calls, form fills and booking clicks were being recorded, and whether each could be tied to the search or ad that produced it. A call only counts toward a Google Ads conversion if it meets the rules set in the account, such as a minimum call length.

Pages

One service page cannot rank for every service in every city. We listed each service and city combination the client wanted work from and checked which had its own page.

The ad account

We read the search terms report, which lists the actual queries the budget paid for. Home service accounts often pay for searches from people who want a job, a free quote template or a DIY guide, not a repair. We marked which queries matched jobs the client wanted and which did not.

Google Business Profile

We compared the profile's categories, service areas and business details against the website. Mismatches between the two give Google conflicting information about what the business does and where.

We recorded the starting numbers before touching anything. That gives later results a baseline to be compared with, instead of someone’s memory of how things used to be.

What we did

Tracking first We set up call tracking and conversion tracking before any other change. Every later decision, including which pages to build and which keywords to cut, rests on knowing which source produced a call. Changing the site first would have made the before and after impossible to compare.
One page per service per city We built pages for the service and city combinations that had none. A page about drain cleaning in one city can say things that a general plumbing page cannot: the neighborhoods served, the local permit rules, the kinds of homes in the area. Each page has to say something true about that place, or it is a copy of the others with the city name swapped, and thin repeated pages of that kind are the sort Google's spam policies target.
Search campaign clean-up We added negative keywords for the queries that were costing money without producing jobs, and split campaigns by service so the budget could be set per service instead of shared. Emergency services and planned installs have different values per job, and a shared budget hides that.

Recent Work

Dental professionals of coral springs

What happened

We counted a call as a lead only when it was a request for work, not a wrong number, a vendor or a job applicant. We counted a job only when the client’s own records showed it was booked. Calls that fail those tests are left out, which makes the lead figure smaller and more honest.

Here is what these numbers do not show. A different business, in a different city, with a different starting position, will get different results. Search results move with competitors, seasons and Google’s own changes, and we control none of those. We cannot promise your numbers will match these, and any agency that does is guessing.

Is your situation similar

Your situation is close to this one if three things are true. Most of your jobs arrive by phone. You cannot say how many of last month’s calls came from search, from ads or from your Google Business Profile. And you serve more than one city but have one page for all your services.

If two of those fit, a short conversation will show whether the same approach applies to you. If none fit, we will tell you that too. To talk through your numbers, call us today.