I spent more than a decade running marketing in-house at a contracting company in Dallas–Fort Worth. Part of that job was hiring agencies. A bigger part of it was firing them.
I sat through the pitches. I watched the dashboards go green while the phone stayed quiet. I learned what the reports were hiding, because I was the person who had to explain to an owner why we had spent forty thousand dollars and could not point to a single booked job.
So this is not a list of tips from someone who has only ever been on the selling side. These are the questions I wish I had asked earlier, and the answers that would have saved me years.
The short version
The best question you can ask a contractor marketing agency is "how many leads did you generate for a company like mine last month, and how do you know?" Everything else is a variation on that. Agencies that cannot answer it will redirect you to impressions, rankings, reach or engagement — all metrics that can improve while your revenue does not. Agencies that can answer it will usually tell you the number without being asked twice.
1. "Who actually does the work?"
The person pitching you is very often not the person who will touch your account. In larger agencies the pitch is run by a salesperson, the strategy is set by an account director you will meet twice, and the actual work is done by a junior coordinator managing thirty accounts, or offshored entirely.
That is not automatically disqualifying. Scale requires delegation. But you should know it going in, and you should meet the person whose hands will be on your Google Business Profile.
Walk if: they get evasive, or the answer is "we have a whole team behind you" without a single name.
2. "Do you work with my competitors?"
This one matters more in the trades than almost any other industry, because your market is geographic and finite. If an agency ranks three roofers in the same city, at most one of them can be in the top map-pack position. The other two are paying for the privilege of losing to a company using the same provider.
Some agencies will tell you their teams are "siloed". In practice, a shared playbook applied to three competitors in one metro means they are bidding against each other on your budget.
Walk if: they already have a client in your trade in your service area and do not volunteer it.
3. "What happens to the website if I leave?"
An enormous number of contractor sites are built on proprietary platforms the agency owns. Cancel, and the site goes dark. Everything you paid to build — the pages, the rankings, the content — evaporates, and you start again from nothing.
This is the single most common trap in contractor marketing, and it is almost always buried in the contract rather than mentioned in the pitch.
Ask specifically: Who owns the domain? Who owns the hosting? Who owns the Google Business Profile? Can I export the site? If I cancel today, what do I keep?
Walk if: the answer to "what do I keep" is anything other than "everything".
4. "Show me a report you sent a client last month"
Not a case study. Not a sample. An actual report, with the client's name redacted if necessary.
You are looking for one thing: does it lead with leads, or does it lead with something else? A good contractor marketing report opens with how many people called, filled in a form, or booked. A bad one opens with impressions, reach, keyword positions or "brand visibility" — metrics that go up reliably whether or not your business does.
I have seen reports where the first six pages were charts and the phrase "phone call" did not appear once.
Walk if: you have to get past page two to find out how many leads you got.
5. "How do you track a lead from search to booked job?"
The answer should involve call tracking with recorded calls, form submissions tied to a CRM, and some way of telling you which page or campaign produced each one.
If an agency cannot tell you which of your leads came from Google Maps versus organic search versus paid ads, they cannot optimise anything. They are guessing, and you are funding the guesses.
This is also the question that most often reveals whether an agency understands contractors specifically. A huge share of contractor leads arrive as phone calls from a mobile map listing. An agency set up to measure form fills will simply not see most of your business.
Walk if: the answer is "you'll see it in Google Analytics".
6. "What are you going to do in the first 30 days?"
You want specifics: audit the Google Business Profile, fix categories and services, build out service-area pages, install tracking, set up review requests. A real answer sounds like a checklist.
A vague answer — "we'll develop a custom strategy aligned with your goals" — usually means there is no standard process, which means the quality of your outcome depends entirely on who they assign you.
Walk if: they cannot describe month one without a discovery call you have to pay for.
7. "How long before I see results, and what does 'results' mean?"
Honest ranges, roughly:
- Google Business Profile improvements: map-pack movement in two to six weeks
- Organic rankings for competitive service terms: 60 to 90 days for real movement, compounding after that
- Paid search: leads within days, stopping the day you stop paying
- Review velocity: noticeable effect on map-pack position within a couple of months
Anyone promising page one in thirty days for a competitive term is either guessing or lying. Anyone who will not give you a range at all is protecting themselves rather than informing you.
Walk if: the timeline has no numbers in it, or the numbers seem too good.
8. "What do you need from me?"
This is the question that catches people out, and the answer tells you whether they have actually done this before.
A good agency will ask you for job photos, access to your Google Business Profile, a list of the towns you serve, your real pricing, and time — usually a call a month and quick answers when they need something. Marketing a contracting business requires the contractor's input, because nobody else knows what a job actually costs or which work you want more of.
An agency that says "nothing, we'll handle everything" is telling you they intend to publish generic content with stock photography. That content will not rank, because it is indistinguishable from everyone else's.
Walk if: they need nothing from you. That is not convenience, it is a warning.
9. "What's in the contract, and how do I get out?"
Twelve-month contracts are standard in this industry and they exist mainly to protect the agency during the months when results have not arrived yet. There is a legitimate argument for them — SEO does take a quarter to show real movement, and clients who cancel in month two never see anything.
But there is a difference between a twelve-month term and a twelve-month term with an auto-renewal, a ninety-day cancellation window and a penalty. Read for the exit, not the entry.
Ask specifically: Is there an auto-renew? What notice do I need to give? Is there a cancellation fee? What happens to my assets on the last day?
10. "Have you worked in my trade?"
The honest answer to this is more useful than the impressive one.
Trades genuinely differ. Plumbing is emergency search decided in ninety seconds. Roofing is dominated by shared-lead economics and storm cycles. HVAC lives and dies on seasonal spikes and maintenance-plan revenue. Land clearing is a research-heavy purchase where cost content wins. An agency that has never worked in your trade will spend your first quarter learning it.
That is not always a dealbreaker — the underlying mechanics of local marketing transfer well, and a good operator learns a trade in a month. What matters is whether they tell you the truth about it.
Walk if: they claim deep experience in every trade you name. Nobody has that.
What I would actually do
If I were a contractor hiring an agency tomorrow, I would do three things before any call:
- Search your own main service term from a phone, outside your office. Whoever is in the map pack is beating you, and that is the real competitive set — not whoever your agency benchmarks against.
- Look at your Google Business Profile as a stranger would. Categories filled in? Services listed? Recent photos? Reviews from this year? Most contractor profiles fail on all four, and that is usually a bigger problem than the website.
- Work out what a job is worth to you. If a booked job is worth $8,000, a $1,000 monthly retainer needs to produce one extra job every eight months to break even. That number reframes the entire conversation, and most contractors have never done the arithmetic.
Then ask the ten questions above. You will know inside twenty minutes.
Where I stand on this
I run Brandloc, so I am obviously not a neutral party. What I can tell you is how I answer my own questions: I do the work myself, I take one client per trade per service area, you own everything including the site and the profile, plans are month-to-month with no cancellation penalty, and when I have not worked in your trade I say so on the page rather than in the meeting.
If you want to see where you actually stand before talking to anyone, the instant website audit checks your speed, SEO, security and tracking in about thirty seconds with no signup. The free audit is the human version — your profile, your map-pack position and your competitors, with the one fix worth doing first.
Either way, ask the ten questions. Ask them of me too.