Every contractor wants more leads. The usual advice is to run Google Ads, buy leads from HomeAdvisor or Thumbtack, or post on Facebook. All of these cost money, and the lead services send the same lead to several contractors.
There's another way that doesn't charge you per lead: being easy to find on Google yourself. When a homeowner finds your Business Profile or your website and calls you, that lead is yours alone. It isn't free, it takes work and time, and nobody can promise you a spot. But you're not renting it.
What Paid Leads Really Cost
HomeAdvisor and services like it charge you for each lead, and that lead usually goes to other contractors too. You pay for the ones you lose, and you're competing on price from the first call. To see what it really costs, add up a year of lead fees and divide by the jobs you actually closed from them, then add the time spent chasing tire-kickers.
Google Ads are different: the lead is yours alone. But you pay for every click on your ad, whether or not it turns into a call (Google Ads Help, "Cost-per-click (CPC): Definition"), and the day you stop paying, the ads stop. If you run ads, track which clicks became calls or requests, and judge them on jobs, not clicks.
Showing up on your own works differently. It keeps working when you skip a month of spending, but it isn't free to keep up: your profile needs updating, reviews need asking for, and pages need adding.
What Helps You Show Up
A complete Google Business Profile. For "near me" searches, the map results come from Business Profiles. Google says businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local results (Google Business Profile Help, "Tips to improve your local ranking on Google").
Reviews. Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking. Ask after every job with a direct link.
A page for each service and each town you really work, with real content a homeowner would want to read.
A site that works on a phone: tap-to-call at the top, a short estimate-request form, and pages that don't make anyone wait.
Structured data (schema) that matches your Business Profile, so Google reads your name, phone, services and towns the same way everywhere.
Count What Works
Ask every new customer how they found you, and write it down. Every month, add up the leads and the jobs from each source: referrals, your Business Profile, your website, ads, lead services. Divide what you spent on each by the jobs it brought in. That's the only cost-per-job number that means anything for your business.
Do the same math on us. A local lead system from SolutionDG is from $249/month plus a one-time setup from $999, month-to-month. Our monthly report counts the leads that came in and where they came from; you tell us which ones became jobs.
