For a construction company in Quebec, three levers cover most of the order book: a Google Business Profile that is actually kept up to date, a website that turns a visit into a quote request, and paid advertising limited to the radius you genuinely serve. In that order. Budget roughly $1,000 to $2,500 a month for a company of five to thirty employees, ad spend included, and expect six to twelve weeks before a signed job can be traced back to that money. Everything else — video, LinkedIn, newsletters, a blog — has value, but not before those three stand up.
This is the order we install those levers for general contractors, renovators and specialist subtrades, and what each step costs in money and in weeks. It assumes you already have customers and want a predictable flow of requests, not that you are starting out. Our approach for this sector sits on the construction and renovation page.
What makes construction different
Four things drive everything else. The buying cycle is long: someone pricing a kitchen renovation compares, hesitates, postpones, then comes back three months later. The ticket is large, so the customer almost always collects two or three quotes before choosing. The service area is narrow: past thirty or forty minutes of driving, a job stops being profitable. And the work is seasonal, with quiet stretches that fall at different times depending on whether you work outdoors or indoors.
Each one has a direct consequence. The long cycle means you have to be visible before the need turns urgent, not only at the moment of the search. Multiple quotes mean your job is not to be found but to be chosen out of three — which turns on proof and on response time, rarely on price alone. The narrow area means a poorly targeted budget pays for clicks from people you will never visit. And seasonality makes a flat twelve-month budget almost always the wrong call.
Lever 1 — The Google Business Profile comes first
It is the only lever that costs nothing and captures the strongest intent in the sector. Someone typing a trade followed by their city name is not gathering information: they are looking for somebody to call this week. Local listings sit at the top of those results, above websites and above directories. A construction company without a complete profile hands that spot to a competitor who filled theirs in.
Complete means the right primary category, a declared service area, accurate hours, a number that actually rings, and above all photos of real jobs added regularly. The mechanics are in our full guide to the Google Business Profile, and the positioning logic in the piece on local search.
Reviews deserve their own note, because this is where construction really stands apart. Someone about to hand forty thousand dollars of work to a stranger reads reviews with an attention they give to no other purchase. Volume counts, recency counts, and how you answer a bad one counts — including when the review is unfair. Ask at the end of every job, as a routine, not when it crosses your mind.
Lever 2 — A website that produces quote requests
A contractor's website has one job: turning a hesitant visitor into a request qualified enough to be worth a site visit. Anything that does not serve that is decoration. Four things make the difference in practice: separate pages per type of work rather than one catch-all services page, photos of your own jobs with the before and the after, a short form — three or four fields, not twelve — and a tappable phone number visible without scrolling.
The fifth is less obvious: say where you work. A service area written in plain sight removes out-of-territory requests before they cost you a call, and reassures the ones inside the radius. The rest of the structure is broken down in the home page that converts and in our approach to building websites.
In construction you are not competing with whoever is cheapest. You are competing with whoever called back first.
Lever 3 — Advertising, once the first two hold up
The order is not negotiable. Sending paid traffic to a site that does not convert means paying to confirm that it does not convert. Once the profile and the site are in shape, advertising becomes the lever that sets volume — and the only one of the three you can open and close depending on the season and the state of the order book.
Which platform depends on how urgent the need is. Google Ads captures a demand already expressed: someone searches for roof replacement and you appear. Meta creates the demand: nobody was looking, but the before and after of a kitchen down the street does the work. For residential renovation, Meta often comes in cheaper per lead; for emergencies — water damage, roofing, heating — Google almost always wins. The full reasoning is in where to put your first $1,000.
One worked example beats any theory. A renovation contractor was spending $1,500 a month on Meta and collecting about fifty requests, close to $28 a lead, almost none of which turned into a job. After tightening the radius to 25 km, replacing generic visuals with real before-and-afters, building a dedicated landing page and automating the reply, the cost dropped to $2.44 a lead on the same budget. The four changes are detailed here. What moved was not the amount spent: it was what stopped being wasted.
What it costs, and how long it takes
The benchmark we use with clients is 5 to 10 % of revenue, the lower end for an established company holding its position, the upper end for one going after market share. Construction almost always sits below that range, because word of mouth was enough for a long time. That is exactly why a competitor who invests seriously pulls ahead so quickly in this sector.
In concrete numbers, for a company of five to thirty employees: $500 to $1,500 a month of ad spend depending on season and territory, plus the one-off cost of bringing the site up to standard. Cost per lead varies enormously by trade — a few dollars in well-targeted residential renovation, several dozen in new build or commercial. The ranges by sector are on our cost-per-lead benchmark, and the trade-off between channels in allocating your marketing budget.
The timeline is stable. The profile shows an effect in two to four weeks. Advertising delivers volume within days, but you need six to eight weeks before you can judge the quality of the requests. Site rankings are measured in months. A contractor who kills a campaign after three weeks because it is not working kills it precisely when the data becomes readable.
The season sets the calendar
In Quebec, a contractor spending the same amount in January and in May is wasting money in January or missing opportunities in May, usually both. The base rule: advertising launches four to six weeks before the search season starts, not when the work starts. For exterior trades — roofing, paving, siding — that means March, not May. For interior work, autumn. The full seasonal calendar is here.
And the quiet stretch should not be silence. That is when the profile, the reviews and the content work at zero cost while the ad budget sleeps. A company that disappears entirely for four months a year starts over from nothing every spring.
The three most expensive mistakes
First: judging a campaign on cost per click or on the number of requests. In construction, a $3 lead that never signs costs infinitely more than a $40 lead that becomes a thirty thousand dollar job. The number that settles it is customer acquisition cost, and it forces you to track what happens to your quotes.
Second: not following up. In most construction companies, a sizeable share of quotes sent never get an answer and never get chased. Those are already qualified, already visited, already priced customers: the cheapest acquisition that exists, and the most neglected.
Third: answering slowly. A customer who asked for three quotes often decides before the third one arrives. Answering within five minutes is not a courtesy in this trade, it is a measurable advantage. If requests come in but go nowhere, the cause is more often there than in traffic quality — the usual reasons are few.
What to track
Four numbers are enough: requests received per month and where they came from, average time to first response, quote win rate, and acquisition cost per customer. Not impressions, not followers, not click-through rate on its own. The five numbers a business owner should track apply here too, with one nuance: in construction, look at the quote win rate first, because it tells you immediately whether the problem sits upstream or downstream.
If you want to know which of the three levers is missing and which would fill the order book fastest, book the diagnostic call: we look at your profile, your site and your quote numbers, and you leave with the order of work.