Home Services & Trades · Raleigh & the Triangle
Marketing for home services businesses in Raleigh
Home services has two completely different kinds of demand and most campaigns treat them as one. Emergency work is won on proximity, speed of answer and whoever shows up in the map pack at 9pm. Planned replacement work is a considered purchase with three quotes and a two-week decision.
Running both through one campaign means the cheap emergency clicks quietly eat the budget that should have gone to the $14,000 system replacement.
What we run for home services
Campaigns split by job type and margin. Emergency, repair and replacement each get their own structure, budget and landing page, because they convert on completely different timelines.
Call tracking with dynamic number insertion. In this category the phone is the conversion, and knowing which keyword produced which call is the difference between optimising and guessing.
Google Business Profile built for the map pack. Primary category testing, a keyword-matched services list, and a review request system wired into job completion so it keeps running when nobody is watching.
Door hangers and EDDM in the neighbourhoods you just worked. Designed and printed in house. A door hanger on Tuesday and a Nextdoor ad on Thursday in the same ZIP outperforms either one alone.
Nextdoor and Facebook for the neighbourhood-referral effect, which in this category is closer to word of mouth than to advertising.
The number that actually matters
Home and home improvement averages $8.33 per click, an 8.05% conversion rate and $90.92 per lead. Clicks run about 54% above the all-industry average, which puts the lead about 37% higher.
That is the category. It is not a broken campaign. Any agency quoting you a $25 cost per lead for HVAC either has terrible conversion tracking or is counting form abandons as leads, and you will find out which in month three.
46% of consumers add “near me” to local searches always or often, and those results are settled inside the map pack rather than on your website. That is why the Google Business Profile work comes before most of the on-site work.
Benchmarks from the WordStream 2026 Google Ads Benchmarks study, an analysis of more than 13,000 search campaigns running April 2025 to March 2026. Local search and review figures from BrightLocal.
How it works
- 1. Discovery. What a booked job is worth to you over their lifetime, what you can afford to pay for one, and which services actually make you money.
- 2. Tracking first. Call tracking and form tracking installed and tested with a real call and a real submission before anything launches.
- 3. Build and launch. Campaigns, pages or print, depending on what we agreed. Ten to fourteen days from kickoff for paid search.
- 4. Manage and report. Monthly, on cost per booked job rather than impressions.
Common questions
Why is my cost per lead so high?
It probably is not, by category standards. Home services leads average about $91. The more useful question is your cost per booked job, which depends on how many of those leads your team actually converts, and that is usually where the real problem is.
Do door hangers still work?
Yes, and better when they run alongside a neighbourhood ad campaign the same week. Two impressions in two formats beats one impression twice.
Should I be running Performance Max?
Sometimes. It decides across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Discover at once and the reporting will not tell you cleanly where the money went. We run a standard Search campaign in parallel so your highest-intent terms keep priority, and we pull query data through the API.
How fast can you start?
Tracking goes in during days one to five and campaigns launch 10 to 14 days from kickoff. If you need the phone ringing this week, paid search is the only lever that moves that fast.
Who this is for
A good fit: Established trades and home services businesses with the crew capacity to take more work, and someone who answers the phone during business hours.
Not a fit: If nobody can answer calls, or if your budget is small enough that a management fee eats most of it. More ad spend into an unanswered phone is the most expensive mistake in this category.
Book a 20-minute call
You tell us what’s going on, we tell you whether we can help, and if we can’t, we usually know who can. No pitch deck.
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