Every term an agency might use on you.

Running two versions of something — a headline, a form, a postcard — at the same time and measuring which produces more enquiries. The discipline is only changing one thing at a time. Most contractor sites never get enough traffic for a statistically sound test, so the honest approach at small volumes is to change obvious problems rather than to test subtle ones.

The part of a page visible before anyone scrolls. On a phone that is roughly the top four inches, and it is where your phone number needs to be. With 71% of home services traffic arriving on mobile, a call button that requires scrolling is costing you calls from people who were ready.

Extra pieces attached to a search ad — phone number, location, service links, price. Free to add, they make the ad physically larger and give more reasons to click. A call extension is close to mandatory for contractors, since most people would rather ring than fill in a form on a phone.

Google's internal score deciding whose ad shows and in what order. It combines your bid with ad quality and expected click-through, which is why a competitor with a smaller budget can outrank you. You cannot buy your way past a badly written ad pointed at an irrelevant landing page.

Meta's automated campaign type, where the platform makes most targeting and placement decisions itself. Works better than manual setup for many contractors precisely because it needs less fiddling, but it needs a clean conversion signal and enough budget to learn from.

Optimising to be the source an AI assistant quotes when someone asks it a question, rather than to be a blue link. Overlaps heavily with ordinary SEO — complete profiles, structured data, clearly dated accurate content — but the win condition is being cited rather than clicked.

The single agency formally responsible for your marketing. Worth knowing mainly because it is often paired with long contracts and asset ownership clauses. Neither is necessary, and both are negotiable more often than contractors assume.

The automated software AI companies use to read websites, with names like GPTBot, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot. Your robots.txt file decides which are welcome. Blocking them all is a common default that quietly removes you from AI answers entirely.

The AI-generated answer Google places above the regular results on many searches. It pushes organic listings further down the page and reduces clicks on informational queries. It cites sources, so appearing inside one is now a ranking outcome in its own right.

The written description attached to an image, read aloud by screen readers and used by search engines to understand what a photo shows. For contractors it is free relevance: describing a photo as “cedar privacy fence installed in Highlands Ranch” tells search engines something a filename like IMG_4471 does not.

The visible words in a link. Search engines use them as a signal about what the destination page covers, which is why “roof replacement costs” is a more useful link than “click here”. Applies to links within your own site as much as links from other sites.

A channel that contributed to a sale without being the last click before it. A homeowner might find you through a Facebook ad in March and search your name in June. Last-click reporting gives all the credit to the June search, which systematically undervalues awareness channels.

Working out which marketing channel produced a given customer. Without it you are allocating budget on a feeling. In contracting it usually means a separate tracking phone number per channel, because most enquiries arrive as calls rather than form fills and calls are invisible by default.

What a typical completed job invoices at. It sets the ceiling on everything else — a contractor with a $45,000 average job can profitably pay thousands per lead while one at $280 cannot pay $80. Any marketing advice that ignores your average ticket is generic.

A link from another website to yours. Search engines treat them roughly as votes, so links from genuinely relevant local sources — suppliers, trade associations, local news, chambers of commerce — carry weight. Bought link packages are the fastest way to damage a contractor site and the hardest damage to undo.

Telling Google to bid more or less in particular circumstances — by device, time of day, or location. Practical for contractors: bidding up during business hours when someone can answer the phone, and down overnight if nobody can.

How you tell Google to spend in the ad auction — maximise clicks, maximise conversions, target a cost per acquisition. Automated strategies need conversion data to work, which is why a new campaign with no tracking installed will spend badly for its first few weeks regardless of who is running it.

Your total marketing spend divided by total leads across every channel. Useful as a headline and misleading as a management tool, because it hides a failing channel behind a working one. Always look at it per channel before deciding anything.

The share of leads that turn into scheduled jobs. It is the number that separates a cheap lead from a cheap customer, and the reason cost per lead alone is misleading. Two channels at the same lead price can differ by half in what they actually cost per booked job.

The share of visitors who leave without doing anything else. High bounce on a service page usually means the page did not match what was searched, loaded too slowly, or asked for a phone number before giving anything. It is a symptom rather than a diagnosis.

Searches containing your company name. These people had already decided to contact you, so counting them as campaign conversions inflates results with customers you already had. Always ask any agency to report branded and non-branded separately.

The most you can pay for a lead and still make money on the first job. Profit per job multiplied by close rate. Any channel costing less than this earns money immediately; anything above it needs repeat work or referrals to justify. It is the single most useful number a contractor can calculate.

Using a different phone number for each marketing channel so calls can be attributed to their source. Numbers forward to your real line and the customer notices nothing. Without it, the channel producing most of your work is invisible, and most contractor budgets are allocated blind as a result.

A Google Ads format where the ad places a call instead of loading a website. Well suited to emergency trades, where the searcher wants a person rather than a page. Requires that somebody actually answers, which is not always a safe assumption.

A line of code telling search engines which version of a page is the real one when several URLs show the same content. Matters for contractors mainly when a site is reachable at both www and non-www addresses, which splits ranking signals between two versions of every page.

The delivery round a single postal worker covers, and the unit EDDM targets. Choosing routes by average home value or age of housing stock is how a mail drop stops being a blanket and starts being a targeting decision.

The rate at which customers or clients stop. Relevant to contractors twice over: your own customer churn on maintenance agreements, and agency churn, which is worth asking any agency about directly before signing.

Any mention of your business name, address and phone number on another website — directories, association listings, supplier pages. Consistency matters more than volume. An old address on a forgotten directory quietly muddies what search engines understand about where you operate.

Clicks with no genuine interest behind them, whether from bots or competitors. Google filters much of it automatically and credits invalid clicks back. Worth knowing about and rarely worth the anxiety it generates, since the platforms absorb most of it.

The share of people who see something and click it. On paid ads it reflects whether your offer and headline are compelling; on organic results it reflects your title and description. A low CTR with good rankings usually means the listing is not saying anything the searcher wanted.

The share of real leads that become paying jobs. Distinct from book rate, which counts scheduled appointments. Published home services figures average around 7.8% lead to customer overall, but urgent trades run far higher than considered ones because the decision is smaller and faster.

Publishing genuinely useful material — cost guides, process explanations, permit rules — that reaches people before they are ready to hire. In contracting it works because homeowners research for weeks before contacting anyone, and almost nobody in the trades is publishing anything they actually want to read.

Any action you decided counts as valuable — a phone call over 30 seconds, a completed form, a booked appointment. The definition matters enormously: counting every form submission as a conversion inflates results with job applications, suppliers and spam.

The share of website visitors who become enquiries. It multiplies every marketing channel at once, because they all end at the same site. Doubling it doubles leads from every source without buying an extra click, which makes it usually the cheapest improvement available.

How long after seeing an ad a resulting sale still gets attributed to it. Defaults are usually 30 days, which badly undercounts trades where the decision takes months. A remodeler using a 30-day window is systematically undervaluing every channel they run.

A small file storing information about a visitor, used for analytics and remarketing. Increasingly restricted by browsers and privacy law, which is one reason first-party data like your own customer list keeps getting more valuable relative to platform targeting.

Google's measurements of loading speed, visual stability and responsiveness. Largest Contentful Paint covers load speed and Interaction to Next Paint covers responsiveness, which Google elevated to a primary ranking signal in March 2026. Test on mobile data, not office wifi.

What you paid to gain one customer, as opposed to one lead. Sometimes used interchangeably with cost per booked job. The distinction from cost per lead is the whole game: a channel with cheap leads and a poor book rate is not a cheap channel.

Spend divided by jobs actually won. The most useful number in contractor marketing and the one most often missing from agency reports. If an agency cannot produce it for the last ninety days, they are tracking activity rather than outcomes.

What you pay each time someone clicks a paid ad, whether or not they ever contact you. Ranges from a few dollars to $45 in the most contested contractor keywords. Rising CPCs are why the traffic you prevent through negative keywords is worth as much as the traffic you buy.

Total spend divided by leads produced. Useful for comparing like with like and dangerous for comparing anything else, because it says nothing about whether those leads book. Always pair it with book rate before making a budget decision.

Cost per thousand impressions — what you pay to be seen a thousand times, regardless of clicks. Mainly a Meta metric. A high CPM points at an auction or targeting problem: too narrow an audience, or a frequency so high the platform is charging you to keep showing the same thing to the same people.

How search engines and AI systems discover pages, by following links from one page to another. A page nobody links to and no sitemap mentions may simply never be found. This is why orphaned service pages sometimes never rank no matter how well written they are.

What happens when the same ad has been shown to the same people too many times. Response drops and the platform charges more to keep delivering it. In the trades this is common because photographing new work feels like a low priority until the cost per lead climbs.

Scheduling ads to run only at chosen times. For contractors the useful version is simple: spend more when someone can answer the phone. Paying full price for 2am clicks that reach voicemail is a common and avoidable waste.

Physical mail sent to homes in your service area. Unusually well suited to contracting because it is geographically targetable and a single won job typically covers the whole drop. Works on repetition — a single mailing rarely tells you anything useful.

Google's network of banner placements across third-party websites and apps. Cheap impressions and generally poor intent for contractors, since nobody browsing a recipe site is looking for a plumber. Occasionally useful for retargeting people who already visited you.

The process for reclaiming money on a Local Services Ads lead that was wrong number, wrong service, wrong area or spam. Google refunds valid disputes. Almost no contractor files them, which quietly inflates their real cost per lead above the published benchmark.

A third-party score estimating how strongly a website is likely to rank. Not a Google metric and not used by Google, despite how often agencies quote it. Useful as a rough comparison between competitors; meaningless as a target in its own right.

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — the qualities Google's raters are asked to assess. For contractors it translates into showing real people, real completed work, licence and insurance details, and content that could only have been written by someone who does the job.

Every Door Direct Mail, a USPS service delivering to every address on chosen carrier routes with no mailing list required. The cheapest way to blanket a neighbourhood, and a natural fit for trades where any homeowner could be a customer.

A lead sold to one contractor only — you. Google Local Services Ads, Google Ads, map pack calls and organic enquiries are all exclusive because the homeowner contacted you directly. The opposite of a shared marketplace lead, and usually far cheaper per booked job despite a higher sticker price.

Information you collected yourself — your customer list, your call records, your quote history. As platform targeting gets more restricted it becomes steadily more valuable, and in contracting it is usually sitting unused in invoicing software.

The average number of times each person has seen your ad. On Meta, frequency above roughly 2.0 signals that your creative is being over-delivered to a saturated audience, which raises cost and lowers response. Check it before increasing budget.

The path from someone first becoming aware of you to signing a contract. In contracting it can be minutes for an emergency call-out or months for a kitchen remodel, and confusing those two is why some campaigns feel broken when they are simply measured too early.

Optimising to appear inside AI-generated answers rather than in a list of links. Used more or less interchangeably with AEO. The practical work is unglamorous: complete and consistent business information, structured data, and clearly dated accurate content on questions people actually ask.

Targeting ads to people inside a defined physical area. Occasionally useful for storm response or trade shows. Frequently oversold to contractors as something more sophisticated than the radius targeting already built into every ad platform.

Your free business listing on Google Search and Maps, and the single most important asset in contractor local marketing. It drives map pack visibility more than your website does, and it is the fastest thing to improve because most competitors have filled in about half of it.

Google's free tool showing which searches brought people to your site, which pages are indexed, and what technical problems exist. Confirm you own the property rather than your agency, because it is the record of what actually happened.

The badge shown on Local Services Ads listings after Google checks licence and insurance. It was called Google Guaranteed until October 2025, so a great deal of guidance still uses the old name. The rename is worth knowing when reading anything written before then.

Measuring your map pack position from dozens of points across a market rather than from one location. It reveals that you rank first at your own shop and nowhere three miles out. Usually the first thing that genuinely surprises a contractor about their own visibility.

A visualisation of where visitors click, tap and stop scrolling. Useful on a contractor site for one specific finding: whether people are reaching your call button at all, or abandoning halfway down a page that buried it.

The top area of a page, above the fold. On a contractor site it needs to answer three things within a second: what you do, where you do it, and how to reach you. Anything else can wait until further down.

Your own list of past and current customers, as opposed to a rented prospect list. It consistently outperforms everything else in direct mail because the recipient recognises your name, and it costs nothing to build beyond keeping records.

One instance of your ad or listing being displayed. Counted whether or not anyone noticed it. Impressions belong on a report as context and never as a headline result, because nobody has ever paid an invoice with one.

Whether a page has been added to a search engine's database and is eligible to appear at all. Distinct from ranking. A page that is not indexed cannot rank no matter how good it is, and checking indexing is the first step when a page mysteriously never appears.

A USPS service emailing recipients a preview image of mail arriving that day. Advertisers can attach a clickable digital version, which is a rare case of print and digital genuinely stacking rather than being counted twice.

What the person searching actually wants. “Emergency plumber near me” and “how to fix a leaky tap” are the same topic and opposite intents — one wants to hire you, the other wants to avoid hiring anyone. Sorting keywords by intent rather than volume is most of what good contractor SEO is.

How quickly a page responds visually after someone taps or clicks. Google elevated it to a primary ranking signal in March 2026. A lag makes a visitor assume the site is broken, which matters most on exactly the emergency searches where you least want hesitation.

A word or phrase someone types into a search engine. Contractors are routinely sold keyword counts as a result, which is why the number appears on reports so often and never on invoices. What matters is whether a keyword is attached to work you want.

Two or more of your own pages competing for the same search term, splitting signals so neither ranks well. Common on contractor sites that generated a page per town from a template and ended up with forty near-identical pages fighting each other.

An estimate of how hard it would be to rank for a term, based on who currently does. Useful for prioritising. Worth ignoring when a term is low volume but high intent — a difficult keyword attached to $40,000 jobs can be worth more than an easy one attached to nothing.

Repeating a search phrase unnaturally in the hope of ranking for it. It stopped working roughly fifteen years ago and now actively damages a site. Still visible on plenty of contractor pages built by template services.

The page an ad sends someone to. The rule is match: if the ad promised bathroom remodeling, the page should be about bathroom remodeling rather than your homepage. Mismatched landing pages are one of the most common and most expensive faults in inherited contractor ad accounts.

How long the main content of a page takes to appear. Under 2.5 seconds on mobile is the working standard. Test it on cellular data standing in a yard rather than on office wifi, because that is where your customer is.

A person who contacted you about work. Whether that includes job applicants, suppliers, wrong numbers and spam depends entirely on who is counting, which is why an agency's lead number and your own often differ by a wide margin.

Something useful offered in exchange for contact details — a cost guide, a maintenance checklist, a financing explainer. Works best in considered trades where the homeowner is months away from hiring and not yet ready to speak to anyone.

Staying usefully present with someone who is not ready yet. In contracting the window on larger work runs months, and most contractors chase twice and stop. Reported figures suggest a large majority of leads never convert without follow-up.

The period at the start of a campaign when a platform is gathering enough conversion data to optimise. Budgets too small to produce enough conversions never exit it, which is why underspending on Meta buys an unreliable test rather than a cheap one.

Total profit from a customer across every job they ever give you, not just the first. Trades with maintenance or repeat work should judge acquisition cost against lifetime value rather than first-job value, which often justifies paying considerably more for a lead than it first appears.

See map pack. The three business listings shown with a map above the regular results, and for most home services searches the most valuable position on the page.

Set weekly rather than daily, and Google may spend up to twice the weekly figure in a busy week before balancing out. Contractors regularly misread this as overspending when it is the system working as documented.

Google's pay-per-lead ads for service businesses, appearing above everything else including the map pack. You pay per lead rather than per click and carry the Google Verified badge after licence and insurance checks. The strongest published economics in contractor paid media.

A longer, more specific search phrase with lower volume and much higher intent. “Emergency burst pipe repair Aurora Saturday” converts far better than “plumber” and costs a fraction as much to rank for. Most contractor revenue hides in the long tail.

An audience Meta builds by finding people who resemble a list you upload. A 1% lookalike from your past customer list is the closest match available and has been reported outperforming interest-based targeting substantially. Your invoicing software holds your best targeting asset.

The three business listings with a map that appear above organic results on local searches. Driven by proximity, relevance and prominence rather than by website quality, which is why a contractor with a mediocre site can dominate it and one with a great site can be invisible.

How closely a search must match your keyword before your ad shows. Broad match reaches the most people and wastes the most money; exact match is tightest. Most inherited contractor accounts are on broad match with no negative keyword list, which is an expensive combination.

The company running Facebook and Instagram, and the usual shorthand for advertising across both. For contractors it is demand creation rather than demand capture — nobody scrolling a feed was looking for a roofer, which explains both the low lead cost and the lower close rate.

Meta's tracking code for your website, enabling conversion measurement and remarketing. Install it before you start spending, not after, or the first month produces no usable data and the campaign optimises against nothing.

An automatic text sent within seconds of a missed call. Usually already built into your phone system and switched off. Probably the cheapest recovery of leads you have already paid for that exists, because a homeowner who gets an instant reply has not started dialling the next contractor yet.

Google evaluating the mobile version of your site rather than the desktop one. With 71% of home services traffic on phones, a site that looks fine on a laptop and cramped on a phone is being judged on the cramped version.

Name, address and phone number. The three details that must match exactly everywhere your business appears online. Inconsistency across old listings is a quiet ceiling on local visibility and unglamorous to fix, which is why it usually has not been.

A term you tell Google never to show your ads for. The standard contractor list starts with DIY phrases, job seekers, training courses and “free”. At $8 to $45 a click, the traffic you prevent is worth as much as the traffic you buy.

Searches that do not include your company name — people who do not yet know you exist. More expensive than branded search and the only kind that represents genuinely new demand. Always report it separately.

The specific thing you are asking someone to take you up on. “$59 tune-up including a filter” is an offer; “call us for a free estimate” is not. On paid social the offer is the single biggest lever on cost per lead, because nothing else qualifies the person.

Combining a mail drop with digital targeting of the same postcodes so the household sees the message in more than one place. Genuinely effective for high-stakes campaigns like storm response, and overkill as a default operating mode.

The share of people who see your unpaid listing and click it. Improved by a title and description that answer the search rather than naming your company. Now depressed across the board by AI answers occupying the top of the page.

Unpaid search results. Slower to earn than ads and cheaper over time, since a ranking keeps producing without a per-lead charge. Organic leads have been reported closing at 14.6% against 1.7% for cold outbound.

How quickly your site becomes usable. Roughly half of mobile visitors abandon a page taking more than three seconds. It affects rankings, ad quality scores and conversion simultaneously, which makes it one of the few fixes that improves everything at once.

A Google campaign type that spends across search, display, YouTube, Gmail and Maps on its own judgement. Produces cheaper leads than search and books them at a lower rate, so the apparent saving partly disappears. Needs brand exclusions or it will charge you for traffic you already had.

A written description of a typical customer, used to keep messaging pointed at real people. Frequently an agency exercise that produces nothing. Occasionally useful for a contractor deciding between two genuinely different customer types, like landlords and homeowners.

Pay-per-click advertising — you are charged when someone clicks, whether or not they ever contact you. Usually means Google Ads in a contractor context. Distinct from Local Services Ads, which charge per lead instead.

How well known and well regarded Google judges your business to be, based largely on reviews, citations and links. One of the three local ranking factors and the only one you can genuinely grow, since proximity is fixed by your address and relevance is capped by what you actually do.

A rented list of households matching chosen criteria, as opposed to your own customers. More expensive per piece than EDDM and more targeted. Responds at roughly 1–2% against 2.7–4.4% for your own house list.

How close your business is to the person searching. The dominant factor in map pack rankings for home services, and the reason your visibility radiates outward from your registered address. Service area settings do not change it, which is the most expensive misunderstanding in contractor local marketing.

An enquiry that is genuinely a potential customer — right service, right area, real intention. Distinguishing these from total enquiries is what separates a report you can act on from one that looks better than reality.

Whether an enquiry was genuinely a potential customer. The most common complaint contractors raise about bought leads, and often a symptom of a vague offer or an untargeted radius rather than of the platform itself.

Google's rating of how relevant and useful your keywords, ads and landing pages are. Higher scores lower your cost per click for the same position. It is why a well-structured small account can beat a badly structured large one.

Showing ads to people who already visited your website. Cheap relative to cold advertising and unusually valuable in considered trades, where a homeowner may take months to decide and should still be seeing your finished work when they do.

How long between an enquiry arriving and you replying. The highest-leverage number in contractor marketing and the one least often measured. It caps the return on every channel simultaneously, and fixing it costs less than any budget increase.

A fixed monthly fee for ongoing work, separate from media spend. Worth separating clearly in any quote, because published percentage-of-revenue benchmarks cover total marketing including retainers, not media alone.

How long after a site visit someone remains eligible to see your ads. Short windows suit emergency trades; longer ones suit remodeling, where the decision genuinely takes months and disappearing after a fortnight wastes the original click.

How steadily reviews arrive, as distinct from how many you have. A trickle after every completed job reads as an active business; thirty appearing in one week reads as something else. Velocity matters as much as volume for local ranking.

Return on ad spend — revenue divided by what you spent to generate it. Commonly cited guidance for contractors is a 5:1 minimum, with the advice being to spend more above that and fix the funnel below 3:1.

A file at the root of your website telling automated visitors what they may read. It decides whether AI systems can see you at all. Many contractor sites block crawlers by accident through a default setting nobody revisited.

The time between first contact and a signed job. Minutes for a blocked drain, months for a kitchen. It determines how long you must wait before judging a channel, and mismatching the two is why some campaigns get cancelled while still working.

Structured data added to a page so machines can read it reliably — your services, hours, area served, prices, FAQ answers. It is how a search engine or AI assistant understands a page rather than guessing at it, and it is largely absent from contractor websites.

The list of phrases people actually typed before your ad appeared, as opposed to the keywords you targeted. Reading it is usually the fastest free improvement available on an inherited account, because it shows exactly what you have been paying for by accident.

Predictable swings in demand and advertising cost through the year. HVAC costs climb in summer; roofing follows storms. Comparing your busiest month to your slowest and calling the difference performance is one of the oldest tricks in agency reporting.

Search engine results page — everything a searcher sees after typing. On a modern contractor query that means an AI answer, then Local Services Ads, then paid ads, then the map pack, and only then the organic results people still call “number one”.

A Google Business Profile setup for businesses that travel to customers rather than receiving them, with the street address hidden. Required by Google's guidelines if customers do not visit you. Hiding the address does not remove proximity from ranking.

A page targeting a specific town or neighbourhood you work in. Real ones name local conditions, permit rules and completed jobs. Templated ones that swap a town name into identical text are discounted by search engines and now drag down the pages that were working.

How often your ad appears relative to how often it could have. A low share means budget or ad rank is limiting you rather than demand. Useful for answering whether more spend would actually buy more leads or simply the same ones twice.

A lead sold simultaneously to several contractors, typically three to five and sometimes eight. The homeowner submits one request and fields a wave of near-identical calls, so the job goes to whoever reached them first rather than whoever suited them best.

A file listing your pages so search engines can find them all. Free, quick, and frequently missing or out of date on contractor sites, which means recently added service pages may simply never be discovered.

A structured data marking indicating which parts of a page are suitable for a voice assistant to read aloud. Niche, cheap to add, and part of making a page usable by machines rather than only by people.

The discipline of replying to enquiries as fast as possible. Contacting within five minutes has been reported making you far more likely to qualify a lead than waiting thirty. In a trade where 78% buy from the first responder, this is a competitive advantage available for free.

See schema markup. Code that states facts about your business in a format machines read reliably rather than infer. Increasingly the difference between being quoted in an AI answer and being invisible to one.

A tracking file set by a domain other than the one being visited, historically the backbone of cross-site advertising and now largely restricted. Its decline is why platforms push for your own customer list instead.

How long visitors spend before leaving. Weak as a standalone measure — a long stay might mean engagement or confusion. Most useful compared between two similar pages rather than judged against a benchmark.

How long a channel takes before producing anything measurable. Days for paid search and Local Services Ads, one to three weeks for direct mail, 30 to 90 days for map pack movement, and two to three months for early SEO signals. Deciding these dates in advance is what stops a normal quiet month reading as failure.

A dedicated phone number assigned to one marketing channel so calls from it can be counted separately. Forwards to your real line invisibly. Without one, phone-driven channels like direct mail and map listings are effectively unmeasurable.

A small piece of code letting an advertising platform record what visitors do on your site. Needed for conversion tracking and remarketing. Install it before spending rather than after, or the first month of data is lost permanently.

Tags added to a link so analytics can record where a visitor came from. Useful for email, social and QR codes on print. Does not capture phone calls, which is why contractors need call tracking alongside it rather than instead of it.

A number that looks impressive and changes no decision — impressions, reach, total keyword count, social followers. Not useless, but they belong in an appendix rather than at the top of a report.

Searches spoken rather than typed, usually phrased as full questions. Relevant to contractors because it skews local and urgent. Optimising for it is mostly the same work as answering real questions clearly on your pages.

The share of direct mail recipients who respond by contacting you. Tracked with a unique phone number or QR code on the piece, because otherwise a mail campaign is unmeasurable and you will never know whether to run it again.

An agency reselling another company's work under its own name. Not inherently bad, and worth asking about directly, because it determines who is actually doing the work and how quickly anything can be changed.

A search answered on the results page itself, through an AI answer, a knowledge panel or a map listing, so nobody clicks through to a website. Now a large share of searches, which is why appearing in those surfaces matters more than site traffic alone.