Local Service Businesses: Here’s What To Expect Working With Us

As a local service business your goal with hiring a marketing agency is clear: get more quality calls.

When your potential customer’s AC breaks down, when their water heater needs to be replaced, or when their lawn gets a bit too messy – you want more quality calls so you can service more customers and make more money.

As a digital marketing agency, that’s our goal too, since we won’t get paid unless we’re clearly delivering an ROI in the long term.

The point of this article is to set expectations and establish a reasonable timeline for achieving our shared goal of more quality calls.

SEO Is a Long-Term Investment

One of the most common misconceptions about digital marketing is the timeline for SEO results. As a remainder, you can’t actually “do” SEO. What we can do, is implement abundant proof that we do an excellent job in our local service area.

While search engine optimization (SEO) is a highly effective tool for improving your business’s visibility on Google, it takes time to see tangible outcomes. On average, it can take around 90 days, sometimes more, to witness significant improvements.

It’s not like we’re twiddling our thumbs either. Even with high authority domains like this one linking to you, it always takes time to expand our performance on Google. Anyone promising you amazing results overnight is lying. 

The reason for this delay lies in the way search engines work; they take time to evaluate your site and rank it accordingly. Keep in mind, you are often competing with businesses that have been optimizing their websites for years. However, the wait is worth it. Once SEO gains momentum, it provides sustained, organic traffic without ongoing costs per click, delivering long-term benefits for your business.

For example, when we started working with Plumbing Pros LLC in Easton, PA, they’re organic traffic and SEO was almost non-existent. Even after a full month working on their website, we didn’t see much difference.

Almost 3 months later, we’ve 17xed their organic traffic by implementing site changes and giving Google time to register the changes, while continuing to build on what’s working.

If you’re looking for a miracle fix to double your organic traffic overnight, we’re not going to be a good fit.

The Quick Wins: Google PPC Ads & LSA

If you’re looking for close to immediate results, Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads and Local Services Ads (LSA) are almost always the first things we optimize to get calls in the door. And if you’re a local service provider, there’s an excellent chance you qualify for LSA.

These platforms allow your business to gain instant visibility. Google PPC ads appear at the top of search results and can start driving traffic and leads as soon as your campaign goes live. With PPC, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, making it a cost-effective approach when managed properly.

They’re also the easiest to test and iterate from, since all of our data should be visible and we can make decisions on a week-by-week basis instead of waiting for Google to crawl backlinks. Other software like certain CRMs and tracking platforms like CallRail allow you to hear the call quality yourself in real time.

We’ve gotten our clients 10+ more quality calls a week simply by iterating on existing PPC campaigns from before we came aboard and got access to the account, meaning it’s one of the easiest levers to pull.

Local Services Ads (LSA) offer an even more targeted approach for local service businesses. LSAs allow you to connect directly with potential customers in your area who are actively looking to hire. Since you only pay for qualified leads, LSA can be one of the most cost-efficient ways to get immediate results.

There’s many ways to optimize LSA, but since we’re only paying for qualified calls instead of window-shoppers, this is also an easy way to get more calls in the door with basic optimization.

However, both PPC and LSA campaigns need ongoing management and optimization to ensure they are maximizing your marketing budget, which is where our expertise comes into play. This can take a few weeks to get to a point where we feel comfortable with, so expect the first month to be a testing period. 

There’s also Facebook Ads, organic video growth, and more. But by setting the stage right with PPC and LSA, we can quickly move into DAD videos on FB and amplify what’s already working organically for us.

Communications and Weekly MAA Is How We Win

Successful marketing isn’t just about strategy; it requires ongoing communication and collaboration between your business and our team. While we take care of the technical aspects of your campaigns, your role in managing the influx of leads is crucial.

For example, if we’re not both on the same page about our progress and lead quality, that means we could have our own set of expectations. If we’ve generated 20 leads last week and 7 of them are duds, we can iterate from there. But if we don’t, it makes iteration incrementally harder.

That’s why we have weekly MAA reports (Metrics, Analysis, Action) in our Basecamp CRM. Our goal here is to constantly iterate so we can determine what’s working and remove what isn’t.

It also falls on you to make sure calls are being answered and your own customers are satisfied, since all our organic and ad improvements won’t make a difference if customers can’t get a hold of you.

Businesses Vary But Our Strategy Remains The Same

Of course, it will be easier to make you more money quicker if your business already has a reputation in your local service area. Just like how it’s easier to make money when you already have some, it’s easier to grow what already exists.

So the timeline for seeing that growth can depend on how much success the business already has, since if we have to save the business instead of growing it, our timelines will certainly be different compared to a $15 Million a year business already doing a great job.

But the point is that for local service businesses, we have our existing SOPs and know exactly what to do to help get calls in the door. Patience within reason will help us both optimize so we can create long term success and watch you grow larger every month.