Home services and trades

You should not have to buy a lead that was already yours

Websites and search for the trades: heating and air, plumbing, electrical, roofing, remodeling and the recurring service businesses. Built for an industry where the busy season, the emergency call and the hiring problem all land on the same website.

Where this comes from

I have never installed a furnace. I do run a service business.

Being exact about this matters more here than anywhere else on the site, because the trades can smell a marketer who has never run anything.

I have not worked in your trade. What I have done is run the marketing for a service company with roughly two hundred people working out of more than twenty locations, where the work happens at the customer's site rather than at ours, where the schedule is the business, and where finding and keeping technicians is the thing that actually decides how fast it grows. Different industry, identical operating shape. I also run my own service business out of a house, which is why the address problem below is not theoretical to me.

So I am not going to ask you what a callback is, why a dispatch board matters, or why your best month and your best marketing month are six months apart.

Who this is for

Eight trades, eight different search problems

Heating and air

The most seasonal business on this list and the one where an emergency call and a maintenance plan are two completely different customers arriving at the same website.

Plumbing

Half the work is somebody standing in water typing with one hand. The other half is a planned repipe researched over three weeks. One site has to do both.

Electrical

A trade where the license is the product and most sites bury it. Panel upgrades, generators and EV chargers are each their own search with their own buyer.

Roofing

Storm driven demand, a crowded market and a customer who has just been door knocked by somebody they did not trust. Proving you are established does more than any offer.

Remodeling and general contracting

Long consideration, large tickets, and a decision made mostly on completed work. The portfolio is the sales argument and it is usually the worst part of the site.

Pool and outdoor

Recurring service and one off construction in the same business, sold to the same neighborhood, on completely different timelines.

Pest, lawn and recurring service

Subscription economics in a trade that markets itself like a one off. Retention is worth more here than acquisition and almost nobody builds for it.

Single van and mobile operators

Often run from a house, often with no address to publish, and usually competing against companies with ten times the marketing budget.

What is actually different

Four things about the trades that general advice misses

Urgency

Two buyers, one website

Somebody with no heat at eleven at night and somebody pricing a system in April are not the same visitor and should not land on the same page. Most trade sites are built entirely for one of them, almost always the planned buyer, and then wonder why the emergency traffic does not call.

Season

Your busy season is the wrong time to start

Search work takes months to compound and the trades spend their money when the phone is already ringing. The right time to build is the quiet quarter, which is exactly when the budget feels tightest. Anybody selling you a campaign in the first week of a heat wave is selling you the easy part.

The middlemen

You are buying leads that were already yours

The marketplaces outrank you for your own service in your own town, then sell you the resulting inquiry, often shared with three competitors who are quoting against you within the hour. You will not out rank all of them everywhere. The work is owning the ground where your own name and your own town should never have been for sale.

The cap

The constraint is technicians, not customers

Ask most owners what actually stops them growing and the answer is licensed people, not leads. Yet the site is built entirely for customers and the careers page is an email address. A trade that is hiring is competing for applicants against every other trade in the county, and that is a search problem nobody treats as one.

The hard one

You work from a house, and you are not publishing that

An enormous number of good trade businesses are run out of a home, and the standard advice is to publish the address so you can be verified. That advice is written by people who are not being asked to put where their family sleeps on the internet.

You do not have to make that trade, and you are not giving up as much as you are told. A service area business can hide the address and still be verified. What you genuinely lose is the map pack, and that is worth saying plainly rather than selling around: the three listings above the normal results need an address Google can check. Nobody can change that and anybody saying otherwise is wrong or lying.

What stays available is most of it. Organic local rankings, service area structured data, pages for the towns you actually cover, and the reviews and signals that decide who gets called. Plenty of trade businesses get the majority of their search work from exactly that, having never appeared on the map once.

In practice

The work is the same. The order is not.

Technically this is a website like any other. The same things make it fast and the same things make it findable.

What changes is sequence. Emergency pages before brochure pages, because that traffic converts today. The quiet quarter before the busy one, because search compounds and heat waves do not wait. The careers page treated as a real page rather than an afterthought, because the technician you hire in March is the capacity you sell in July.

None of that is clever. It is just the order somebody picks when they have watched a service business run rather than only read about one.

Written on this specifically

SEO

Other industries

Where else I already know how the business works

Aviation

I run the marketing for a business aviation services company operating at more than twenty airports. Private aviation, not airlines, and the buyers are national rather than local.

Read the detail

Automotive

I came up in this industry before I did this one. Dealers, parts, performance and restoration are four different businesses that most agencies treat as one.