Battle-tested contractor PPC agency

Your contractor business needs to integrate PPC campaigns...

Let me guess:

You want to leverage contractor marketing to grow your contractor business. You’ve heard of search engine optimization, but it can take up to 6 months (or more) to rank organically on Google.

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is an effective and quick marketing strategy to get instant traction from your target audience.

How do PPC marketing campaigns work?

PPC ads are a form of direct response marketing that puts you in front of potential clients. Both social media and search engines offer robust PPC ad platforms to businesses. 

However, targeting the right keywords via Google search ads allows your contractor business to reach prospects looking for your services RIGHT NOW. Google is a proven ad platform to get high quality leads.

Google AdWords lets your website bypass millions of competitors in search engine results and get instant attention for your contractor services by appearing at the top:

What’s more?

The quality of your traffic from search engines is top notch. By the keyword they plug in Google, you know the user's search intent. 

For example: In the above scenario, the prospect is looking to find and hire contractors in Miami. So targeting the phrase could result in phone calls from high quality prospects and help you get new clients.

However, targeting such “transactional keywords” is only part of creating PPC ads that convert. Let me walk you through three other aspects.

Four important components of a profitable contractor PPC strategy

PPC for contractors needs to begin by taking care of the following elements:

1. Benefit-driven ad copy:  The following four ads appear when I search for “contractor in New York”:

Your ad will compete for attention with many other organic and paid listings. So you need to craft a compelling headline and supporting copy to stand out. 

Avoid generic sales messages — instead, be specific and highlight your unique selling proposition. If you have any special discounts and offers for new clients, mention those.

Your prospective clients will be more likely to click on your ad if they know the benefit they get from doing the same. 

2. High-converting landing page that loads fast: Once a prospect clicks on an advertisement, you need to follow on from the promise you made in your ad in SERPs. So don’t direct visitors to your homepage. Instead, take advantage of contractor web design and create a custom landing page for every ad group and use keywords from your ad.

Also, ensure that your landing page loads fast (use PageSpeed Insights for help) and works well on mobile. Ultimately this page is where a prospect will become your client, so its content and design should facilitate that.

For instance, here are the ads that appear for the keyword “plastering contractor in Los Angeles”:

And below is the landing page by ClickForward that appeared (sorry for the click, CC Cleaning and Maintenance Inc). Note how the landing page doesn’t follow the promise of a “10% Off coupon”, nor does it immediately describe the specific services mentioned in the ad:

3. Ad budget (and smart bidding strategy): We can assume that the average cost per lead is $62.18 for the business services industry (as per localIQ 2021 benchmarks):

If you’re taking the DIY route, take this into account and perform some competitor analysis to find the ad budget prevalent in your industry.

Further, add a PPC cost of $1000 to $5000 every month — depending on your niche, locality, ad budget, and expectations — if you decide to outsource your campaign to a contractor PPC agency.

To get the highest return on your ad spend (ROAS), carefully monitor your bids on keywords, and try to minimize your CPC. Also, keep a watchful eye on the keywords that drive conversions.

4. Keywords with a buying intent: We already talked about bidding on “transactional keywords” that target prospects looking to buy right now. Phrases that begin with modifiers such as “buy”, “best”, and “cheap”, or follow the format [name of contractor services] in [city name] are the most likely to convert. 

However, you need to experiment, monitor your analytics, and eliminate the keywords that don’t lead to form submissions or phone calls.

Now that you have an understanding of the important elements of a PPC campaign, here’s a beginner’s tutorial on the same for getting started:

Does setting up an effective PPC ad campaign following the process above seem like a LOT of work? Then contact On The Map Marketing, share your PPC goals, and get a free PPC audit. We’ll get back with what we can do for you! We also provide contractor marketing services (if you're considering them).