Shared leads are a race, not a pipeline
A marketplace sells the same enquiry several times. You are not competing on quality, you are competing on who calls back within the minute — and paying for the privilege either way.
A marketplace lead is sold to four of your competitors and priced to make that worthwhile for the marketplace. The alternative is a pipeline you own: rankings, a profile that holds the map pack, and reviews that make the choice easy. Directories hold 33% of the top-ten slots we measured — the other two thirds are contractors who did the work.
A marketplace sells the same enquiry several times. You are not competing on quality, you are competing on who calls back within the minute — and paying for the privilege either way.
Across 236 local searches we measured, 967 distinct local contractors held a top-ten slot, and every single search had at least one. The page is contested, not closed.
Cost per lead and close rate vary enormously between trades, and plenty of paid channels do not clear the bar once you compare them to profit rather than revenue. We published the per-trade arithmetic rather than selling past it.
The three results above the organic listings take most of the local clicks. Profile optimization is the biggest lever on getting there and it is work, not spend.
A page for each service in each place you serve. 74% of the contractors already ranking have not built them, which is why the gap is reachable.
Steady generation plus replies to every review — including the critical ones. 56% of one- and two-star reviews in our study had no reply at all.
Google's pay-per-lead placement sits above everything else and the leads are yours rather than shared four ways. Managed where the job value supports it.
Click-to-call, forms that submit on a phone, and response promises on the page. The channel decision in our own data turns on follow-up capability more than on budget.
Call and form tracking so you know which channel produced which job, rather than which channel produced the most clicks.
Almost every local job starts with one of these searches. Owning the result is what turns a search into an enquiry that nobody else was sold.
Before we promise you leads, here is what we measured about where they come from and what they are worth.
49% had no LocalBusiness schema — the one format built for stating what a business does and where. A further quarter had structured data a plugin added for them, which describes the website and says nothing about the business.
16% carried not a single line of JSON-LD. To an AI answer engine deciding who to name for a trade in a city, those businesses are prose to be guessed at rather than a record to be read.
64% have no real service-and-location architecture, and half have not a single page aimed at a town. The search a homeowner actually types — the trade plus the place — has nothing on their site pointed at it.
37% of the sites we read reused one title across several pages. That asks Google to choose between pages all claiming to be the same thing. It usually picks the home page, and the service pages never surface.
34% had at least one page with no H1 at all. Small on its own, and a reliable sign that nobody has looked at the page the way a search engine does.
18% had no sitemap, and a third of the businesses we pulled from public listings served nothing we could read — parked, blocked, timed out or simply gone. Every citation pointing there is a dead end, and the owner almost certainly does not know.
Local Services Ads charge per lead rather than per click and sit above the map pack. Unlike a marketplace, the lead is yours alone. We manage them where the trade's job value makes the per-lead price work.
Measured and written by Cameron, founder of Local Leader.
Study run October 2026 · page last reviewed
The same checks we ran across 500 US contractor websites, run against yours: whether Google can read your pages, whether your services and service areas each have one, and what your profile looks like beside the companies already ranking.
Schema, titles, headings, speed, the sitemap. None of it is glamorous and all of it is cheap compared with what it unlocks. There is no point building content on a site Google cannot read.
A page for each service and each town you can genuinely evidence — not one page per town with the name swapped, which is the thing Google has spent years learning to ignore.
Your Google Business Profile does more for map rankings than anything on your website. It needs photos, posts and a steady flow of reviews, every month, not once at setup.
Most agencies in this trade will not put a number on a page. We would rather you knew now than spent a call finding out. The website build is free in every plan — no setup fee, no build fee — and you own it from the day it goes live.
A monthly package rather than a price per lead. The pipeline compounds and the cost does not rise with your success, which is the opposite of how a marketplace is designed.
The complete system, for companies that intend to lead the market rather than appear in it. $1,199/mo billed yearly.
Franchises and operations running five or more locations. From $4,799/mo billed yearly.
No long contracts and no setup fees. If you leave you keep the website, the domain, the Google Business Profile and the analytics — ask every agency you speak to for that in writing. See what is in each plan.
A purchased lead is typically sold to several contractors at once and the price rises with demand. What we build is owned: your rankings, your profile, your reviews. It takes longer to start and it does not stop when you pause an invoice.
We will not quote you a number before measuring your market, and anyone who does is guessing. Volume depends on your trade, your town's search volume and how much of the map pack you can take — all of which we check first.
Often yes — they charge per lead, sit above everything, and the lead is exclusive. Whether the per-lead price clears your margin depends on job value, which varies from roughly $1,400 to $11,000 across the trades we serve. We check before recommending.
Directories held 33% of the top-ten organic slots in our study, so they are genuinely good at ranking. That is exactly why renting leads from them is expensive — and why the other 47% of slots, held by local contractors, are worth taking.
Local Services Ads can produce leads within days. Owned rankings typically move in 3–6 months and compound from there. Most clients run both so the pipeline is not empty while the slower half builds.
Yes, and it is the single biggest multiplier. In our own first-party data the right channel is decided by follow-up capability more than by budget — a lead you call back in two minutes is worth several you call back tomorrow.
The site, rankings, profile and reviews stay yours and keep producing, decaying slowly rather than switching off. That is the whole difference between a pipeline and a subscription.
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