Marketing words, in plain English.

Showing two versions of one thing (a headline, an ad, a landing page) to similar groups and measuring which one produces more of the result you want. Useful once you have enough traffic for the difference to mean something; for most service businesses, fixing the obvious problems first beats testing the subtle ones.

The AI-generated answer Google places above the regular results for many searches. It draws on the same pages that rank well and names businesses directly for some commercial searches, which is why clear, corroborated, well-reviewed pages matter more than ever.

The work of making your business the one an AI assistant names when someone asks it for a recommendation, whether that is ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews. In practice: plain pages that say what you do, for whom and where; consistent details everywhere; steady reviews; and direct answers to the questions customers actually ask.

Knowing which marketing produced which customer. For a service business it takes four habits rather than a data team: ask every lead how they heard about you, tag every link you control, track the phone, and connect closed revenue back to its source monthly. Without it, budgets get set by feel.

A link from another website to yours. Search engines read it as a vote of relevance and trust, which is why local mentions (a supplier, an association, a news story, a partner) help a service business rank. Bought links are the version that stopped working and can hurt.

The share of visitors who leave a page without doing anything else. High on a service page usually means the page did not answer the question the visitor arrived with, loaded slowly, or hid the next step. It is a symptom to investigate, not a score to chase.

What people expect from you before they have worked with you, built from every contact they have had: the truck, the reviews, the reply time, the invoice. A logo is the smallest part of it. For a service business, the brand is mostly the reputation for doing what you said, on time, in the way you said.

The one thing you want a visitor to do next, said plainly: call, book, send a message. A page with one clear call to action repeated where people are ready for it converts; a page with six competing ones, or none, does not. On this site every call to action goes to the contact form.

Using a different phone number for each channel (the profile, the ads, the mailer, the truck) that forwards to your real line, so you can see which channel made the phone ring. It is the only reliable way to attribute phone leads, which for most service businesses is most leads.

Customers you had who stop coming back. Practices, memberships and maintenance-plan businesses live or die by it. A recall or reactivation system that reaches people before they forget you is usually cheaper than any campaign to replace them.

Clicks divided by impressions: of the people who saw the ad, listing or link, how many acted on it. A useful diagnostic for headlines and profile photos, and a poor goal in itself, since a click that never becomes a conversation is a cost.

The share of leads that become customers. Closing one in four is 25%. It multiplies everything: at the same ad spend, a business closing 40% earns nearly twice what one closing 22% does. The fastest lever on it is answering every lead within the hour.

Publishing useful answers (articles, videos, posts, emails) so customers find and trust you before they call. For a service business the source is always the same: the questions customers actually ask, answered properly once and reused in several places.

A visitor doing the thing you wanted: a form sent, a call made, an appointment booked. Which action counts should be decided in advance and measured the same way every month. Traffic is not a conversion. Neither is a like.

Conversions divided by visitors, for a page or a channel. It tells you whether the problem is too few people arriving or too few of them acting. A service page turning 5% of visitors into conversations is doing well; below 1% usually means the page, not the traffic.

What you pay each time someone clicks an ad. It varies by industry, place and competition; legal and finance run high, and big metros run higher than mid-sized markets. On its own it says little. Cost per lead and cost per customer are the numbers that decide things.

Ad spend divided by the leads it produced. National averages for Google search ads run about $70 overall, around $91 for home services, $104 for business services and $132 for attorneys (WordStream 2025). Whether yours is good depends entirely on what a lead is worth to you.

Everything you spent on marketing and sales in a period, divided by the customers it produced. Cost per lead divided by close rate gets you there for one channel. Compared with what a customer is worth, it is the single number that says whether to spend more or less.

The path from stranger to customer to referrer: how they first hear of you, what they check, why they reach out, what happens after. Writing it down shows where people fall out (usually at the reply) and where a system would catch them.

What a customer is worth over the whole relationship, not just the first job: repeat work, upgrades, referrals. A dog groomer's $60 appointment becomes $2,000 over three years. It is the number that decides how much you can afford to pay to acquire a customer.

Reaching the people who gave you their address, on a rhythm, with something worth opening. Still the highest-return channel most small businesses have (about $36 back per $1, by Litmus's estimate) because you own the list and the cost to send is close to nothing.

A set of emails sent automatically on a schedule after a trigger: a welcome series after a sign-up, a follow-up series after an inquiry, a reactivation series after a customer goes quiet. Written once by a person, sent forever by a system.

Crediting a customer to the channel that first brought them to you, as opposed to the last one they clicked before converting. This site records first touch: the source, the campaign, the referrer and the landing page of a visitor's first visit, then attaches them to any lead they send later.

Experienced marketing direction for a set scope each month instead of a full-time hire: someone to set priorities, run or oversee the work and report on what it produced, at a fraction of a marketing director's salary. Suits businesses with real marketing to do and nobody senior to run it.

A picture of the customer journey as stages with fewer people at each: aware, interested, inquiring, hired. Useful for finding the leaky stage. Dangerous when it becomes a reason to buy software before the leaky stage (usually the reply) is fixed.

Showing ads to people whose phones were seen inside a boundary you draw: a conference, a competitor's location, a job site. Works for high-value, concentrated audiences; a waste for routine local services or anything urgent. Often sold under the same name as plain geotargeting, which is not the same thing.

Showing ads only to people in a chosen city, radius or set of ZIP codes. Every ad platform does it, and every local campaign should use it tightly: the areas you actually serve, not a 50-mile circle you would never drive.

Paying to appear when someone searches for what you do. Search ads charge per click; Local Services Ads charge per lead. For a service business the decision is arithmetic: a lead is worth customer value times close rate, and if that clears the cost per lead with room to spare, run them.

The free listing that shows your business on Google Maps and in the box beside search results: hours, photos, reviews, services, posts, questions. For most local service businesses it is seen more than the website and decides who gets the call from the map.

A specific description of the customers most likely to buy, pay well, stay and refer: not everyone, the particular people your business is built for. It is the first thing a strategy defines, because every other decision (channels, message, budget) depends on it.

The number of times something was shown: an ad, a post, a listing. Not the number of people, and not evidence anyone noticed. Reported enthusiastically by vendors because it is always large. Judge channels by leads and customers instead.

The words someone types into a search engine. For a service business the useful ones are specific: a service plus a place, a problem plus a place, a question a customer would actually ask. Pages that answer one such question plainly outrank pages stuffed with a dozen.

A page built for one arrival and one action, usually the destination of an ad. It matches what the person searched for, answers their question, shows proof, and asks for the one thing. Sending ad clicks to a home page is the most common way to waste a campaign.

A person who has raised a hand: a call, a form, a message, a walk-in. Not a visitor, not a follower. Leads are the unit most service business marketing should be measured in, and the first hour after one arrives is where most of them are won or lost.

Something useful offered in exchange for contact details: a guide, a checklist, a calculator result. It works when the thing is actually useful and the follow-up is human. It fails when it is a thin PDF attached to an aggressive sequence.

Staying in touch with leads who are not ready yet, with something useful, on a schedule, until they are. Most service businesses lose these people to silence. A short sequence of real messages and a reason to reply keeps you the obvious call when the moment comes.

The three map listings Google shows above the regular results for local searches. Landing in it is driven by relevance (category, services, a complete profile), distance, and prominence (reviews, mentions, a site that ranks). For many searches it takes most of the clicks.

Getting found by people searching near you: the Google Business Profile, reviews, consistent name-address-phone across the web, service and area pages that name the places you serve, and local mentions. Map visibility moves in one to two months; the rest compounds over six to twelve.

Google's pay-per-lead ads for eligible categories (home services, legal, financial, real estate and more) that sit above the regular search ads with a Google Guaranteed or Google Screened badge. Placement is driven by reviews and responsiveness. Usually the first paid channel to turn on if you qualify.

The decisions that come before any tactic: who you serve, why they should choose you, where the next customers will come from, and what gets priority. Written down, it is a few pages. Skipped, it is the reason most small business marketing fails.

A documented, repeatable process that brings in leads whether or not anyone is working on it that day: a trigger, a set of steps, a measurable output. The five that matter most for a service business are lead capture, follow-up, reviews, referrals and a content rhythm.

The channels and activities you run to execute a strategy: ads, posts, emails, mailers, events. Tactics are where the money goes, which is why choosing them before the strategy exists spends it in the wrong direction. Running Facebook ads is a tactic; deciding whom to reach and why is strategy.

The agreed words for who you are for, what you do, why you over the alternative, and the proof, so every page, ad, proposal and reply says the same thing. It stops the website, the profile and the owner from describing three different businesses.

Your name, address and phone number spelled identically everywhere they appear: website, Google profile, directories, social pages. Mismatches read as two different businesses to Google and to the AI assistants that now build shortlists. Boring, free, and worth an afternoon.

What customers say about you publicly, mostly on Google. In a mid-sized market they are usually the tie-breaker among credible options. Volume and recency beat a perfect score, and the way to get them is a system, not a favor: a trigger after every job, a personal ask, a direct link, a reply to every one.

The channels you own rather than rent: search, email, reviews and referrals. Paid ads stop the moment you stop paying; organic channels keep working and get cheaper per customer over time. They take six to twelve months to compound, which is why paid fills the gap while they build.

Marketing channels you control: your website, your email and text list, your Google profile, your customer records. Contrasted with paid media (ads) and earned media (reviews, press, word of mouth). The list is the most valuable owned channel most service businesses neglect.

The one sentence a stranger could repeat about you: what you do, who it is for, and why you over the alternative. Narrow wins, because a specific promise is easier to remember, refer and rank for. It goes at the top of the website, in the profile and in every proposal.

A repeatable way of asking for and rewarding introductions, instead of hoping for them: a trigger after a good outcome, a specific ask, something in it for the referrer, and a record of who sends work. Word of mouth is a system when it is written down.

Showing ads to people who already visited your site or watched your video, usually for 30 to 60 days after. One of the two things Meta ads are good at for a local business, because the audience already knows you. Cheap, always on, judged by calls and forms.

Revenue produced by a campaign divided by what it cost. A 4× ROAS means $4 of revenue per $1 spent. It ignores margin and the cost of delivering the work, so pair it with cost per customer and what a customer is worth before deciding a campaign is good.

Code on a page that tells search engines and AI assistants exactly what the page is about: a business with an address and hours, an article with an author and date, a question with its answer. It does not replace clear writing; it confirms it. This site uses it on every page.

Making it easy for search engines to find, understand and trust your pages so they show up when people search for what you do. For a service business in 2026 it comes down to a finished Google profile, steady reviews, fast pages, and service and area pages that say plainly what you do and where.

Splitting a list or an audience into groups that should hear different things: past customers versus prospects, corporate planners versus Saturday regulars, homeowners versus property managers. The simplest segmentation (who has bought and who has not) doubles the usefulness of an email list.

How long it takes a business to reply to a new inquiry. The research is old and unrefuted: a reply within the hour made a firm about seven times as likely to qualify a lead as a reply an hour later. For most service businesses it is the cheapest growth in the building.

Being the person people trust on one subject, built by writing short notes from real work rather than manifestos, on the one thing you know better than anyone nearby. It is not a personal brand and it does not need a bookshelf photo. Give it a year.

Short tags added to the end of a link (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) so your analytics can tell which link the visitor came from. Every link you control (the profile, emails, ads, social bios) should carry them. Without them, most of your traffic gets credited to nothing.

The plain statement of what a customer gets from you and why it is worth choosing you for. It sits inside positioning: positioning is who you are for and why you; the value proposition is the promise itself. If it could be on a competitor's site unchanged, it is not one yet.

Customers recommending you to people they know. Still the channel that decides most hires in a mid-sized market, and the one owners most often say they rely on without being able to measure. It becomes a referral system the moment you ask, record and thank on purpose.

A search that ends without anyone clicking a result, because the answer appeared on the results page itself: a map listing, a phone number, an AI Overview. A growing share of searches. The response is not to fight it but to be the business whose details and answers appear there.