Straight answers, by topic

Our Groundbreaker Program is $1,495 per month on a 6 month commitment, plus a minimum of $1,000 per month in ad spend that you pay directly to Google.

The $1,495 covers Local Service Ads management, Google Ads management, Google Business Profile SEO, reputation management, citations, geo-tagged photos, your website and its hosting and maintenance, technical SEO and backlinking, AI visibility work, and lead tracking with monthly reporting. The ad spend is separate because it is not ours — it goes to Google, and you keep the account.

Because it is not our money. Ad spend is billed by Google directly to your card on your own account, so you can see every dollar and you keep the account and its history if we ever part ways.

Agencies that bundle ad spend into one invoice make it impossible for you to tell what was media and what was margin. It also means that when you leave, the account history — which is what makes campaigns perform — leaves with them.

The Groundbreaker Program runs on a 6 month commitment.

Six months is not an arbitrary lock-in. Paid channels produce leads within days, but Google Business Profile ranking and SEO compound over months, and judging that work at week six tells you nothing useful.

Our work runs in monthly cycles: monthly reporting, meetings as needed, and same-day answers from our team. Tell us the number you are trying to hit and we will be honest with you about how long it realistically takes to get there.

Your website is hosted and maintained by us while your plan is active. If you leave, you can continue managing it or purchase it. Your domain and the materials you provide always remain yours.

This is published on our pricing page and on the home page too, because "who owns the website" is the question that catches most contractors out when they try to change agencies.

We do not publish a separate setup fee. What we publish is the monthly programme fee and the ad-spend minimum, and if anything else would apply to your situation you will hear it before you sign, not after.

Under about $500 a month usually buys one task done partially, and very often no call tracking at all — which means nobody can tell you whether it worked.

The cheap end is not always a scam; it is usually just a smaller scope than the buyer thinks they are getting. The problem is that without tracking there is no way to find out either way, and a year can go by.

We do not publish a results guarantee, and we would be sceptical of anyone in this industry who does — nobody controls Google’s auction or your competitors’ budgets.

What we do commit to is transparency: you own the accounts, you can open the reporting yourself at any time, and if a channel is not producing you will hear it from us first.

Three steps. First a video meeting to go through your current marketing and your goals. Then you sign up, complete our new client questionnaire and book an onboarding call. After that it is monthly reports, meetings as needed, and same-day answers from our team.

Paid channels — Local Service Ads and Google Ads — can produce calls within days of going live. Google Business Profile and SEO improvements compound over months.

That difference is why our programme runs both together rather than one or the other. The paid side pays the bills while the organic side is being built; the organic side is what makes the paid side cheaper later.

Access to your existing accounts, your licence and insurance documents for Local Service Ads verification, and roughly an hour for the onboarding call and the questionnaire.

You do not need to have anything in good shape already. An unclaimed Google profile or an ad account with a bad history is normal and is part of what we fix.

No. Your Google Ads, Google Business Profile and analytics accounts stay in your name and you keep administrative access to all of them.

We have taken on clients whose previous agency held their accounts hostage so they did not even own their own digital assets. That is a large part of why the company is run the way it is.

Yes. We work with contractors across the United States. Our office is in Fort Worth, Texas, and our clients are not.

No. Running ads for two companies bidding on the same keywords in the same service area means driving up each other’s costs, and only one of them can be told the truth about it.

Local Service Ads sit above everything else, carry the Google Guaranteed badge, and charge you per lead. Google Ads sit below them, charge per click, and give you far more control over exactly which searches you appear for.

Most contractors want both. LSAs capture the highest-intent local searches cheaply; Google Ads cover the ground LSAs cannot target, including services and areas outside your LSA categories.

For most septic and home-service contractors, yes — LSAs are usually the cheapest qualified lead available, because you pay per lead rather than per click.

The catch is that LSA lead quality varies and Google will bill you for wrong numbers and out-of-area calls unless someone disputes them. We score every lead and file the disputes, which is a meaningful part of what the management fee buys.

Every call and message that comes through your ads is transcribed and scored, so you can see at a glance which were real jobs, which were price-shoppers, and which were spam worth disputing.

It is not a black box that decides for you. The recording and the duration are attached to every lead, so you can always listen to the call yourself and disagree with the score.

Our programme requires a minimum of $1,000 a month in ad spend. What is right above that is set by your market and by how much of it you are trying to cover.

There is a real ceiling worth knowing about: sometimes a channel is demand-capped rather than budget-capped, meaning there simply are not more searches to buy. When that is true, more money buys nothing, and we will tell you rather than take a percentage of it.

Nine times out of ten the problem is the page the ad points at, not the ad. If the ad promises a specific service and the click lands on a generic home page, the visitor leaves.

This is measurable rather than a matter of opinion: Google reports how much of your impression share you lose to ad rank versus budget, and it reports a Quality Score per keyword. Low Quality Scores with high rank loss means the destination page is the constraint, and adding budget will not move it.

No. We turn search partners off on every search campaign we run, across every client.

Search partners spend your budget on sites that are not Google, with materially worse intent and much less visibility into where the money went.

Both, deliberately. Call extensions on Google Ads use your real line with Google’s own call reporting, while tracking numbers are used where they will not break anything.

Putting a tracking number in a Google Ads call extension is a common mistake that breaks Google’s own call conversion reporting. The right answer differs per placement.

Proximity to the searcher, relevance and prominence. You cannot change where you are, so the work is in categories and services, review volume and recency, photos, posts and citation consistency.

For a service-area business without a storefront, proximity works differently and the other factors carry proportionally more weight — which is good news, because those are the ones you can influence.

More than the competitors showing above you in the map pack, and recent. A profile with 40 reviews where the newest is two years old reads worse than one with 15 from this quarter.

No. Never. It violates Google’s policies, it gets profiles suspended, and it is dishonest.

What we do is make asking systematic, so real customers who were happy are actually prompted at the right moment instead of being forgotten.

Respond to it, publicly, calmly and specifically — and then keep collecting good ones so it is not the newest thing anyone sees.

We write a response to every review, good or bad, as part of the programme. A well-handled one-star reply frequently reads better to a prospect than the review reads badly.

They are photos uploaded to your profile with location and keyword data attached, posted on a schedule rather than in one dump.

They are not a magic ranking lever. They are a freshness and relevance signal, and profiles that are actively maintained do measurably better than profiles that are set up once and abandoned.

Listings of your business name, address and phone number on other sites. What matters is that they match each other exactly.

Inconsistent citations — an old address here, a disconnected number there — actively confuse Google about which entity you are. Cleaning them up is unglamorous and it works.

Publish the specific, checkable facts an assistant needs in order to name you: real pricing, real reviews with names and dates, named people with credentials, and direct answers to real questions — in plain HTML that a crawler can read without running JavaScript.

AI assistants do not reward keyword density. They reward being the source that most cleanly answers the question with attributable facts. That is why this site publishes its own prices and its own reviews rather than hiding them behind a form or a widget.

No, though the foundations overlap. Traditional SEO competes for a ranked position; AI visibility competes to be the source that gets cited inside an answer.

The practical difference is structure. A page that ranks can bury its answer in paragraph nine. A page that gets cited answers in the first two sentences, in a form the model can lift.

They do, if you let them and if your content is in the HTML. Many sites accidentally block them in robots.txt, and many more hide their best content inside JavaScript widgets that crawlers never execute.

Review widgets are the most common version of this. The reviews look fine to a human and are completely invisible to a retrieval bot — which is precisely why the reviews on this site are baked into the page instead.

By recording a baseline: asking the major assistants the questions your customers ask, noting whether you were named, which sources they cited, and which competitors came up — then re-running the same set later.

It is directional rather than a precise rank number, because these systems do not return stable rankings. Recorded consistently, the direction is still legible.

Months, not weeks, and anyone promising otherwise is selling something. Technical fixes can show up quickly; ranking and authority build slowly.

By leads, not impressions. We report your actual phone calls and form submissions, you have access to your reporting at any time, and you own your accounts and data. If a channel is not producing, you will hear it from us first.

It attributes each incoming call to the channel that produced it, with a recording and a duration. Without it, nobody can tell you which of your marketing is working.

The most common failure we inherit is a business spending money across four channels with no way to tell which one produced the phone call — so the budget gets moved on gut feeling.

A call that lasts long enough to be a real conversation, or a form submission from a real person. Wrong numbers, hang-ups and spam are filtered out and not counted.

Counting every ring as a lead is how agencies produce impressive reports that do not match the owner’s experience of the phone. We would rather the number be smaller and true.

Yes. You get a dashboard you can open yourself, not a PDF you wait for at month end.

Load fast, say what you do and where, and make the phone number and the form the easiest things on the page. Everything else is secondary.

It also has to be readable by machines. If your services render through a widget, or your reviews load by JavaScript, then search engines and AI assistants cannot see the very things that would make them recommend you.

Sometimes, and carefully. A tracking number can be added as the primary with your real number as secondary, but done wrong it creates duplicate-listing problems.

It is yours. Your leads, recordings and reporting belong to you, and you keep access to the accounts they live in.

Details of how it is stored and who can reach it are on our security and privacy page.

Google Local Services Ads and pay-per-click advertising, custom websites built to convert, AI and search engine optimization, and Google Business Profile management. Everything is backed by call and form tracking, so each lead is attributed to the channel that produced it.

Blue-collar and home-service businesses. Septic is the trade we know best, and we also work with foundation and drilling contractors, HVAC, plumbing, excavation and event venues. The common thread is a phone that needs to ring with the right calls.

Sometimes, but be honest with yourself about the ad budget. A new business with no reviews and under $1,000 a month to spend on ads is usually better served by getting the Google Business Profile right first.

We would rather tell you that on the first call than take six months of fees to prove it.

When a channel is not working, when more budget will not help, and where not to spend money at all.

One of our clients specifically credits being advised where not to spend. It costs us revenue in the short term and it is the reason the relationships last.

Call (817) 670-3672, book a strategy call directly on our calendar, or send us a message through the contact form.

Yes — there is a booking calendar for exactly that. We interview septic, wastewater and excavation operators about how they actually run their businesses.