Websites, local SEO and paid ads for the trades. Built by one person in Cambridge who publishes the real numbers, names the clients, and tells you when something is not working.
This is the part that makes people angry, and it should. The company beating you in the search results is often not better at the work. They are just easier for Google to understand.
Wrong primary category, empty services section, no photos in a year, no posts ever. Google reads that as a listing nobody maintains and ranks it accordingly. For a local trade this is the single highest-leverage thing on your whole marketing list, and it is free.
Trade searches happen town by town. If every page on your site names only your home city, that is the only place you can appear. The fix is a real written page per town you drive to, not one page with the name swapped out twenty times.
Four phone photos and the words quality workmanship since 1998 is what every competitor has. A homeowner with four tabs open picks on proof: real photos of real jobs, and reviews that say something specific. Almost nobody in the trades has either done properly.
The system is the same underneath. What changes is which searches matter, how seasonal the work is, and what the photographs need to show.
Emergency and planned work, town by town, with the profile doing most of the heavy lifting. Electrical is live with North Grid; HVAC is open.
The most crowded auction in the trades. The play is owning the organic and map results the storm chasers never touch.
Emergency searches live in the map pack. Water heaters, softeners and iron filters are the planned work worth building pages for.
Sold almost entirely on photographs of the finish. Seasonal, so the funnel has to exist before the ground thaws.
Five months of selling in a twelve month year. Being visible in February is the whole difference.
Drywall, welding, stump removal, excavation, remodeling. If your customers type a problem into Google, the same work applies. Ask.
Each trade page covers the same four services in its own language: website design, local SEO, Google Ads and Meta ads. Pricing for all of it is on one page, in public.
Every figure below came out of an account we run, pulled from Google, with the client named and the date range attached. Twelve months ending October 2026. Nothing here is a stock screenshot or a borrowed case study.
Website plus ongoing local SEO over twelve months. Climbed from buried on page five to the edge of page two, and the click rate nearly doubled on the way. Also 101 tracked leads from ads at $73.61 each.
See the numbers$12,103 of Google Ads spend over twelve months produced 2,954 clicks at a 7.6% click-through rate, roughly double what most local service accounts run.
See the numbersNew site for a CNC grinding and custom tooling shop whose customers run from John Deere down to walk-ins. Went from 399 clicks a year to 1,232.
See the numbersAcross every Google Ads account we manage: $20,580 of spend, 4,961 clicks, 94,856 impressions and 323 tracked leads over twelve months, at a blended $63.71 per lead. A tracked lead means a submitted form or a tapped phone number, counted by conversion tags we installed and verified ourselves. It does not mean a signed job, because no ad platform can promise you that.
Those three ad accounts are irrigation, pole barns and remodels, and drywall. The wider client list also covers concrete and masonry, electrical, manufacturing, welding, stump removal, plumbing and a gym. The one trade not yet represented is roofing, and that page says so on its face rather than implying otherwise.
There is one more number worth knowing. No monthly retainer client has ever left. That is a small sample and we are not going to dress it up as a statistic, but it is true and it is the thing we are most careful about.
Websites are quoted per project. Ongoing marketing runs month to month. Ad spend is billed separately and goes straight to Google or Meta, so you always know what we are paid and what the platforms are paid.
One-time project. Most Minnesota contractor sites land in here.
For a business with a decent site that needs the phone to ring.
Everything, including me on site with a camera twice a month.
Month to month, no contracts. For SEO we recommend giving it at least six months, because that is how long it takes to be worth judging. If you would rather commit to twelve months, two on-site photo and video shoots are included at no charge.
No. Trades are most of the client list, which is why most examples come from there, but the same work applies to anyone whose customers search for a problem. We have done it for a manufacturer and a gym. If you own a mini golf course, you are welcome here too.
Usually proximity and profile activity rather than the website. Google weights how close a business is to the searcher and how alive its listing looks. A worse site with a complete, active, well-reviewed profile and a real street address beats a better site with a neglected one. Knowing that is half the fight.
The Google Business Profile, almost always. It is free, it moves fastest, and it is the thing nobody touches after setup. Then the site, then content for the towns you serve, then ads once the first three are carrying their weight. Anyone who leads with ads is selling you the easiest thing to bill for.
Local improvements can show in weeks. Competitive trade searches take three to six months and sometimes longer. We will tell you where you realistically sit before you pay anything, including when the honest answer is that your market is too small for SEO to be the right spend.
No. Monthly marketing is month to month. We ask you to give SEO six months before judging it, because that is how long it takes to be worth judging, but that is advice and not a lock. Website projects have a written scope and the site is yours once it is paid for.
Cory does the web, SEO and advertising. Ashlyn handles operations and photography. No account manager, no overseas team, nobody you have never met touching your account. That is also why there is a limit on how many clients we take.
