Reference
Home Service Marketing Glossary
Every term you'll hear from an agency, ad platform, or marketing consultant — defined in plain English, with the context that matters for HVAC, plumbing, roofing, and the other 13 home-service trades I work with.
Metrics
- CPL (Cost Per Lead)
- Total marketing spend divided by the number of qualified leads generated. For most home-service trades, healthy CPL ranges from $40 (cleaning) to $300+ (roofing, remodeling).
- CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
- Total spend divided by the number of booked or closed jobs — not just leads. Always more meaningful than CPL because it reflects sales-team performance.
- CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
- Fully-loaded cost to acquire one new customer, including ad spend, agency fees, sales labor, and CRM costs. The truest ROI denominator.
- LTV (Lifetime Value)
- Total gross profit a customer generates over their entire relationship. For recurring trades (pest, pool, HVAC maintenance), LTV is often 4–8× the first-job ticket.
- ROAS (Return On Ad Spend)
- Revenue generated divided by ad spend. A 4:1 ROAS means $4 in booked revenue for every $1 of ad spend. Home services typically need 5:1+ to be profitable after job costs.
- Booked-Job Rate
- Percentage of leads that convert into a scheduled, on-the-truck job. The single biggest leverage point in home-service marketing — agencies obsess over CPL while owners should obsess over this.
- Close Rate
- Percentage of estimates that convert to signed jobs. Standard ranges: HVAC install 30–50%, roofing 25–40%, remodeling 15–25%.
- Average Ticket
- Mean invoice value across all completed jobs. Tracking AT by lead source reveals which channels bring high-value vs. price-shopper leads.
- Lead-to-Customer Rate
- End-to-end conversion: of every 100 leads, how many become paying customers. Multiplies booked rate × close rate.
SEO
- GBP (Google Business Profile)
- The free business listing that powers Google's Map Pack. The single highest-ROI marketing asset for any local home-service company.
- Map Pack (Local Pack)
- The 3 business listings Google shows above organic results for local-intent searches like 'plumber near me'. Capturing one of these 3 spots typically 5–10× phone calls vs. ranking #1 organic.
- LSA (Local Service Ads)
- Google's pay-per-lead ad format for licensed trades, marked with a 'Google Guaranteed' badge. Shows above the Map Pack. You only pay for valid lead calls, not clicks.
- Google Guaranteed
- Background-check + insurance verification badge required to run LSAs. Google refunds customers up to $2,000 if work isn't satisfactory — a strong trust signal.
- NAP (Name, Address, Phone)
- The trio of business identity data that must be byte-identical across your website, GBP, Yelp, BBB, and industry directories. Inconsistent NAP suppresses Map Pack rankings.
- Citations
- Mentions of your NAP on third-party sites (Yelp, Angi, BBB, HomeAdvisor, industry directories). Build 30–50 high-quality citations before chasing backlinks.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust — Google's quality framework. For home services: licensing, insurance, real photos, named technicians, and review velocity all count.
- Service-Area Page
- A dedicated landing page for each city/suburb you serve, with localized content (not just a city name swap). The backbone of local SEO for multi-city service areas.
- Schema Markup
- Structured data (JSON-LD) telling search engines what a page is about — LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, Review. Required for rich results and AI citation.
- Backlink
- A hyperlink from another site to yours. Quality (relevance, domain authority) matters far more than quantity. Local press, supplier sites, and BBB are easy wins.
- Search Intent
- What the searcher actually wants — informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional. 'AC repair near me' is transactional; 'why is my AC blowing warm' is informational. Match content to intent.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's page-experience metrics: LCP (loading), INP (responsiveness), CLS (visual stability). Slow sites lose rankings on mobile-first indexing.
Paid
- Google Ads Search
- Keyword-targeted text ads on Google's search results. The default paid channel for emergency trades because intent is explicit ('burst pipe plumber').
- PMax (Performance Max)
- Google's AI-driven campaign type that runs across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Maps from a single asset bundle. Powerful but a black box — feed it negative keywords and audience signals.
- Quality Score
- Google's 1–10 rating of your ad+keyword+landing-page relevance. Higher QS = lower CPC. Below 7 means your landing page is the bottleneck.
- Negative Keywords
- Terms you tell Google NOT to show your ad for ('DIY', 'jobs', 'free'). The single most-neglected lever in home-service Google Ads accounts.
- Match Type
- How tightly your keyword matches a user query: Exact, Phrase, or Broad. Broad without negatives = burned budget. Phrase is the sweet spot for most service businesses.
- Day-Parting
- Scheduling ads to run only during hours your phone is answered. Costs nothing, improves CPL 20–40% for trades that don't have 24/7 answering.
- Geo-Fencing
- Restricting ads to a precise geographic boundary (zip codes, radius, polygon). Critical for trades with hard service-area limits.
- Retargeting
- Showing ads to people who already visited your site. Cheap, high-converting — and underused. Set it up once and forget it.
- Meta Ads (Facebook/Instagram)
- Interest- and demographic-targeted ads. Better for awareness/education (remodeling, pool, landscaping) than emergency demand (HVAC outage, plumbing leak).
Conversion
- CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)
- Systematic improvement of the percentage of site visitors who become leads. A 2%→4% jump doubles your business with zero added traffic.
- Hero Section
- The above-the-fold area of a landing page. Must answer in 5 seconds: what you do, where you do it, why trust you, and how to act.
- CTA (Call To Action)
- The button or link asking for the conversion ('Get Free Estimate', 'Call Now'). Specific, low-friction CTAs outperform generic ones 3:1.
- Form Abandonment
- Percentage of users who start your contact form but don't submit. Cut fields ruthlessly — every required field drops completion ~10%.
- Click-to-Call
- A tel: link that opens the phone dialer on mobile. For emergency trades, click-to-call should be the primary CTA — not a form.
- Above the Fold
- The portion of a page visible without scrolling. 80% of visitors decide whether to engage here. Treat it as a billboard, not a brochure.
Reviews
- Review Velocity
- How many new reviews you collect per month. Google's algorithm rewards consistency more than total count — 4 per month beats 50 in one burst.
- Review Gating
- The (now-banned) practice of only asking happy customers for public reviews. Violates Google's policy and risks GBP suspension. Ask everyone.
- Review Schema
- JSON-LD that surfaces your star rating in search snippets. Combined with AggregateRating, it produces the gold-star SERP result.
CRM
- Speed-to-Lead
- Elapsed time from lead submission to first human contact. Under 5 minutes triples close rate. Over 30 minutes, you've lost most leads to the next contractor.
- Lead Nurture
- Automated sequence of emails/texts that warms a lead from inquiry to booked job. Essential for considered trades (remodeling, roofing, pool).
- Estimate Follow-Up
- Structured outreach after a quote (call + email + text at 24h, 72h, 7d). Doubles close rate vs. send-and-pray.
- Reactivation
- Re-engaging past customers via email/postcard with a maintenance or seasonal offer. Cheapest lead source you have — these people already trust you.
Analytics
- GA4 (Google Analytics 4)
- Google's event-based analytics platform. Replaced Universal Analytics in 2023. Essential for tracking form submits, calls, and conversions.
- UTM Parameters
- URL tags (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) that tell GA4 where a visitor came from. Without them, paid traffic shows up as 'direct' and ROAS is invisible.
- Call Tracking
- Dynamic phone numbers (CallRail, CallTrackingMetrics) that attribute phone leads to the marketing channel that generated them. Non-negotiable for any business >50% phone leads.
- Conversion Event
- A measurable action that signals revenue intent — form submit, call, chat, booking. Configure 3–5 in GA4; more dilutes the signal.
- Attribution Model
- Rule for assigning credit across touchpoints in a customer journey. Last-click is the default but underweights awareness channels (Meta, YouTube).
Content
- Topic Cluster
- A pillar page + supporting articles covering one topic in depth. Signals topical authority to Google and AI engines, which improves rankings across the entire cluster.
- Content Pillar
- A long-form, comprehensive guide (3,000+ words) that anchors a topic cluster. Internal-linked from every related supporting article.
- Programmatic SEO
- Generating dozens or hundreds of pages from a template + data set (e.g., '{service} in {city}' across 50 cities). Powerful when the data is genuinely useful, spammy when it's not.
Strategy
- Niche Down
- Focusing on a narrower trade or customer profile to beat broader competitors on relevance. 'Boutique kitchen remodels for $80K+ homeowners in 3 zip codes' outperforms 'general remodeling'.
- USP (Unique Selling Proposition)
- The one thing you do better/differently than every competitor. Most home-service sites have none — making them interchangeable on price alone.
- Brand vs. Direct Response
- Brand marketing builds awareness over months; direct response asks for the lead now. Most home services need 80% direct response, 20% brand.
- Marketing Mix
- Allocation of budget across channels (SEO, Google Ads, Meta, direct mail, referral programs). Should be rebalanced quarterly based on CPL by channel.
- Insourced Marketing
- Hiring/training in-house staff to execute marketing instead of paying an agency retainer. Typically saves 60–70% vs. agency fees at $15K+/month spend.
AI
- AI Overview (SGE)
- Google's AI-generated answer block at the top of search results. Citations come from sites with strong schema, clear topical authority, and direct answers.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- Optimizing for citation by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini. Requires structured data, FAQPage schema, llms.txt, and direct-answer content formatting.
- llms.txt
- A markdown file at /llms.txt that tells AI crawlers what your site is about and where to find canonical content. The 'robots.txt for AI'.
- Zero-Click Search
- A query answered directly in the SERP (featured snippet, Map Pack, AI Overview) without the user clicking through. Now ~60% of all Google searches.
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