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7 Questions to Ask Before You Sign With a Marketing AgencyMost contractors evaluate agencies on the pitch. The pitch is the least informative part. Every agency has a good one.These seven questions get at the things that actually determine whether you'll be happy in month eight. Ask them out loud and watch how quickly the answers come.1. Do you work with my competitors?The only acceptable answer is a clear no, with terms. If an agency serves three HVAC companies in the same metro, they are optimizing against themselves, and someone is getting the leftovers.Ask specifically: one client per trade per metro, in writing? If they hedge, you know where you stand.2. Who owns the content if we part ways?You'd be surprised. Plenty of agreements leave the articles, the pages, even the domain in the agency's possession.If you spend two years paying for content and can't take it with you, you weren't building an asset. You were renting your own website, and the rent goes up when you try to leave.3. What exactly am I getting each month, in numbers?Not "content and optimization." How many articles. How many posts. What gets published, on what schedule, by whom.Vague scope is how a retainer quietly shrinks in month four when a bigger client shows up.4. Who writes it, and have they ever spoken to a technician?Content written by someone who has never been on a job site reads like it. Homeowners can tell, and so can Google, which has spent years learning to reward material that shows real experience.Ask whose name goes on the article. If the answer is nobody's, ask why.5. What's your pricing, and why isn't it published?Hidden pricing usually means the number is sized to what the agency thinks you'll pay. There's no other reason to keep it secret.You publish your prices to homeowners. It's fair to expect the same from someone selling to you.6. What happens to the ad spend?Ad money should go directly from you to Google or Meta, unmarked up, in an account you own. If an agency runs ads through their own account and bills you a bundled number, you cannot see what you actually paid per click.Ask to be the owner of the ad account. The answer tells you a lot.7. When will I know if this is working, and what will you show me?The honest answer is three to six months for local search, and the metric should tie to booked jobs — not impressions, not "engagement."Anyone promising page one in thirty days is selling ads and calling it SEO. That isn't necessarily bad, but you should know which one you're buying.The patternEvery one of these questions is really the same question: is this arrangement built so that I keep something, or so that I keep paying?Good agencies answer all seven quickly, because they've already decided where they stand. Hesitation is the signal.For what it's worth, our answers are on the site: one client per trade per metro, you own everything, pricing published, ad spend never marked up, six-month initial term because that's how long the work takes.

7 Questions to Ask Before You Sign With a Marketing Agency

Why Isn't My Google Business Profile Showing Up in Birmingham?This is the most common question I get from contractors, and it usually arrives in a frustrated tone: "I searched my own service and I'm not there. My competitor is. What's going on?"Here are the actual reasons, in roughly the order they turn out to be the culprit.You're searching from the wrong placeGoogle's map results are heavily distance-based. If you're standing in your shop in Trussville and searching "AC repair," you'll see companies near Trussville. A homeowner in Vestavia Hills searching the same phrase sees a completely different set.So before assuming something is broken, check whether you rank where your customers actually are rather than where you happen to be standing. You will never rank equally across an entire metro, and no honest person will promise you that.Your categories are wrong or too fewThis is the single most common fixable problem. Your primary category carries enormous weight, and a lot of profiles were set up years ago with something vague like "Contractor" instead of "HVAC Contractor" or "Air Conditioning Repair Service."Set the primary category to the thing you most want to be found for. Add secondary categories for your other real services. Don't stuff it with categories you don't actually serve, which does more harm than good.Your service area is defined badlyListing eighty cities does not make you rank in eighty cities. Google generally treats an overly broad service area as a weak signal rather than a strong one.Worse, a lot of profiles have a service area that doesn't match reality — cities the company hasn't sent a truck to in years, or a radius drawn once and never revisited.You have no recent activityA profile that hasn't been posted to in eight months looks abandoned. Posting weekly is unglamorous, takes a few minutes, and is one of the few levers you fully control.Same with photos. Real job-site photos with recent dates beat stock images and beat nothing at all.Your reviews stoppedReview velocity — how recently and how steadily reviews arrive — matters more than the raw total. A company with 60 reviews spread across the last year usually outperforms one with 200 reviews that all landed in 2022.If you're only asking for reviews when someone remembers, you don't have a review system. You have a habit that breaks whenever you get busy.Your website isn't backing up the profileThe profile doesn't work in isolation. If your site has no page about the service, no mention of the city, and nothing published in two years, Google has very little reason to trust that you're the best answer for that area.This is where profile management and content stop being separate projects. The profile is the storefront; the site is the evidence.Someone else claimed or edited itIt happens more than you'd think. Profiles get claimed by a former marketing company, an old employee, or a lead-generation service. Suspensions also happen quietly, often over an address or category issue, and nobody tells you.If you can't edit your own profile, that's the first thing to solve — before anything else on this list matters.How to find out which one it isMost companies have three or four of these at once, and the order matters — fixing posts while your categories are wrong is wasted effort.A Visibility Teardown checks all of it: categories, service area, posting and review velocity, what your two closest competitors are doing differently, and how fast your own web form responds. Five business days, and you keep the plan whether or not we work together.

Why Isn't My Google Business Profile Showing Up in Birmingham?

Angi, Thumbtack, or Your Own Content: What Each Lead Actually CostsEvery home-services owner I talk to in Birmingham has the same complaint about lead marketplaces, and it's rarely about the sticker price. It's the feeling of paying rent on customers they thought were theirs.So let's put real numbers on it, because this comparison usually gets made with feelings instead of math.<h2>What a bought lead really costs</h2>A shared lead in HVAC, plumbing or roofing generally runs somewhere between $75 and $150 depending on the trade and the job type. Emergency and replacement leads cost more than maintenance calls.But the sticker price isn't the real cost, because the lead is shared. Three or four companies get the same homeowner's number at the same moment. If your close rate on a shared lead is 20 percent — and for a lot of companies it's lower — then five leads at $100 each is $500 spent to book one job.Then add the part that never makes it into the spreadsheet. You have to answer within minutes or the lead is worthless, which means somebody is watching a phone all day, or you're paying for leads you never had a real shot at.And when you stop paying, it stops that day. There is no residual value in a lead you bought in March.<h2>What an article really costs</h2>At $3,000 a month for eight articles, each piece costs roughly $375 to produce. More than one lead. Less than the five it takes to book one job.The difference is what happens afterward. The article published in June 2026 is still sitting there in June 2029, still answering the same question, still putting your number in front of somebody searching at eleven at night. It cost $375 once.It also isn't shared with three competitors. When a homeowner reads your piece on whether a compressor is worth replacing, you're the only company in the conversation.<h2>The honest comparison</h2>Bought leads win on speed. If your schedule is empty next week, content will not save you, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something. Buy the leads. Run the ads.Owned content wins on cumulative cost. Year one it looks slow and expensive. Year three you have sixty or eighty articles working every day, your cost per booked job keeps falling, and the lead marketplace keeps raising its rates.Most healthy companies run both. The mistake is running only the first one forever — which is how a company ends up ten years old with no owned audience and a marketing bill that goes up every January.<h2>The arithmetic worth doing this week</h2>Pull last year's numbers and find two figures: what you spent on bought leads, and how many jobs you actually booked from them.Divide the first by the second. That's your true cost per job from purchased leads, and it's usually two to four times what people assume it is.Then set that against a fixed monthly retainer that produces assets you keep. Not because content is automatically cheaper in month one — it isn't — but because you should know both numbers before deciding which one gets more of your money.Most contractors have never run that division. It's the most useful hour of arithmetic in this business.If you'd like help doing it, a Visibility Teardown includes a look at where your leads come from now and what they're costing you. Five business days, and the plan is yours whether or not we end up working together.

Angi, Thumbtack, or Your Own Content: What Leads Really Cost

What Should a Home-Services Company Actually Pay for Marketing in Alabama?If you've asked three agencies what marketing costs, you've probably gotten three versions of the same non-answer: "it depends on your goals." That isn't caution. That's the number being sized to what they think you'll pay.Here's the honest version, with real figures, for HVAC, plumbing, roofing and electrical companies in the Birmingham and Huntsville metros.<h2>The short answer</h2>Most established home-services companies in Alabama should expect to spend between $1,500 and $5,000 a month on marketing that builds something they own — plus whatever they choose to put into ads on top of that.One to three trucks: $1,500 a month is a realistic floor. Four to twelve trucks: $3,000 is where most companies land. Multiple locations or markets: $5,000 and up.Those aren't invented brackets. They're what the work costs when it's done by someone who actually talks to your technicians instead of running your website through a content generator.<h2>What each level should get you</h2>At $1,500 a month, you should be getting roughly four articles, your Google Business Profile actively managed and posted to, review requests going out on a schedule, and a monthly report you can understand without a translator.At $3,000, add another four articles, service-area pages for the cities you actually send trucks to, lead-response automation so inquiries get answered in seconds instead of hours, and a quarterly conversation about strategy.At $5,000, add short-form video, paid search management, campaigns aimed at the competitors outranking you, and a live dashboard instead of a monthly PDF.<h2>What you should not be paying for</h2>Setup fees over about $1,000 with nothing delivered on day one. "Reporting" that turns out to be a screenshot of a traffic graph. Content written by someone who has never spoken to a technician. Ad spend that gets marked up before it reaches Google. And any contract where the agency keeps the content if you leave.That last one matters more than people realize. If you spend two years paying for articles and the agency owns them, you have rented your own website.<h2>Bought leads versus owned content: the actual math</h2>A shared lead from a lead marketplace runs somewhere around $75 to $150 in this trade, and three or four companies get the same one. You call fast or you lose it. Then next month you buy it again.An article costs once. The one published in June 2026 is still answering the same question and still booking jobs in 2029, at no additional cost.Neither is wrong. Ads buy speed, content buys independence. Most companies need both — but if all you ever do is buy leads, you never stop paying rent on your own customers.<h2>How long before it works</h2>Three to six months before local search moves in a way you can feel. About a year before it compounds. Anyone promising you page one in thirty days is selling ads and calling it SEO.That timeline is also why any honest agreement should run at least six months. A month-to-month deal has you deciding whether it worked at month three, right before the results arrive.<h2>The question that actually matters</h2>Not "what does marketing cost." The better question is "what is one job worth to me?"If your average system replacement runs $12,000 and a month of marketing costs $3,000, the arithmetic is not complicated. One additional job a quarter covers it. Two a month and it's the best line item on your P&amp;L.The reason most contractors can't answer that question is that nobody ever tied their marketing spend to booked jobs. That's a reporting failure, not a marketing one — and it's fixable.We publish our own pricing rather than making you ask for it. You can see it at braxvisualshq.com. If you'd rather know where your company stands before spending anything, a Visibility Teardown takes five business days and the plan is yours whether or not we work together.

What Should a Home-Services Company Pay for Marketing in Alabama?

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BraxVisuals is a Birmingham, AL-based digital strategy studio helping creators and small businesses across the U.S. turn attention into revenue. Services include conversion-focused website design, automation and funnel systems, traffic strategy, branding, and local SEO/listings setup.

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7 Questions to Ask Before You Sign With a Marketing Agency

Why Isn't My Google Business Profile Showing Up in Birmin...

Angi, Thumbtack, or Your Own Content: What Leads Really Cost

What Should a Home-Services Company Pay for Marketing in ...