Episode 6

Ezra McCarthy
Hello and welcome back to the Lawn Care Success Blueprint. Today we have Jake Hunley from Evergrow Marketing and he’s going to be giving us some information on marketing, pay-per-click. Great to have you here, Jake. Do you mind just telling us a little bit about your business?

Jake Hundley
Yeah, thanks for having me. We have a lawn care landscaping digital marketing business much like yours. I think we’ve been in business—this is our seventh year in business now—but we primarily focus on Google Ads and SEO combined. So really leaning on the Google Ads side and the PPC paid advertising area. And with that, we pride ourselves with a lot of the data that we can aggregate and collect. If you go to our website, there’s all kinds of information on there on what your average CPC is for the industry, average CPAs, things like that. So yeah, just very heavy in the industry, very heavy in the paid ads and SEO space.

Ezra McCarthy
Thanks, Jake. I’m just curious, before we get into the nitty gritty—because I’d be surprised—I was just helping someone this week, and even though this was a… well, I guess I forgot to ask the exact amount, but they’re a several hundred thousand dollar lawn and landscape company, and the owner is a smart guy. But he had even some of these basics that we’re going to break down here in a little bit. Even some of those terms you threw out, just like PPC, some business owners don’t know what that means. And so we’re going to break that down here in a minute. But I’m curious, have you ever seen a lawn and landscape business name that made you think this company is definitely not ranking on Google?

Jake Hundley
This might out him, but I’ve told him about this already. He has the word “Diddy” in his name, like in his business name. And this was before the whole thing. It’s what he referred to his dad as when he was a kid. It’s endearing, but at the same time, I was like, I think we need to read the world right now. And I did—I convinced him to change his domains as an initial instead of having that in there. So it was ranking on Google for all the wrong things.

Ezra McCarthy
That is sad, but kind of funny. You know, we talked about some of the things that people don’t realize about pay-per-click. Just real quickly—that stands for pay-per-click. What are some common pay-per-click—we’ll just use the acronym from now on, PPC—myths that just drive you crazy when you do onboarding calls or talk to customers?

Jake Hundley
I don’t know if… I think I hear a lot of, like, “We’ve tried pay-per-click in the past and it doesn’t work.” And it’s like, well, when you did it, it didn’t work. Because last year we worked with 61 lawn and landscaping accounts and our average cost per lead was like 80 bucks. And those had like 50% close rates. So that’s pretty good.

The other side of that is, if people think that $80 leads from Google are expensive, that kind of irks me a little bit. Because that is very telling—people just don’t know their lifetime value.

But I would say probably the biggest one—again, a lot of things don’t really bother me—but the thing I have to explain the most to clients or potential clients is, they want to push services during certain times of the year. And that’s just not a thing with search. You can allocate specific budgets to certain things, but if the demand isn’t there, it’s not going to spend.

So if you want to push aeration in the spring, that’s fine from a social media perspective, but that doesn’t really work out in a Google Ads or SEO perspective. One, because the demand just isn’t there to push for that. People don’t search for things like aeration. They do, but not in large populations. They search for things like lawn care.

So if you want to try to push something like a subservice of lawn care, a social media or outbound method is going to be more appropriate for that. Otherwise, just leave the campaign on—everything is demand-driven.

Like snow removal, for instance. People will say, “Hey, I want to pause my snow removal campaign in the summer because we’re not doing snow removal, obviously.” Well, if nobody’s searching for it, then it’s not going to spend. Why bother to pause it?

The other thing too is, okay, let’s say somebody does search for it in your target area and they do click on it—is that such a bad thing? Because now they’re just trying to find companies to get on the schedule for the winter. That’s probably the number one thing I have to explain the most.

Ezra McCarthy
One comment I think you made there is you said, “It didn’t work for me.” And normally the way I try to do it—we run pay-per-click as well, so does Cody, feel free to check them out—but one thing I noticed when we were helping someone this week, or maybe it was last week, is normally we try to set it up on our account and give them access so they see what we’re doing.

Well, this client was a little bit different. We worked with him and set it up on his. There were some preexisting settings in there, and I think going forward, I’m just not going to do it that way. And here’s why.

They had some settings on the backend—auto… Google was adding in keywords. So I set it up, put the appropriate keywords in, set it all up. I come back a week later and I’m like, why in the world did someone click on an ad for lawn mower repair? And I look at the keywords, and Google had added in these wonky keywords.

Just to break it down a little simpler: when you use pay-per-click, you have to put in keywords that people are actually typing in. Your keyword might be “lawn care,” so you type in, “I want to be found for these terms,” and then you’ll be shown. Well, Google had put into the keywords ones I had not.

So one thing to really note is: Google’s goal is to get you to spend as much money as humanly possible—as much as they can suck out until you’re a dry corpse. Well, not quite, but you know what I’m saying—as much as they can.

Ezra McCarthy
And as a business owner, we’re trying to get the best value. So going to what you said—doing it right—that’s like… I don’t know what your perspective is on this, Jake, but I always avoid the… now I’m going to get the phrasing wrong… Google search partners? Am I using the right phrase? I always avoid that.

Jake Hundley
Yeah. So there’s two things to uncheck. When you set up a search campaign, there’s the display network—which you want to turn off—and you also want to turn off the Google search partners network.

Search partners network is anything that’s not Google that uses Google’s paid sponsored results in searches. And then also the display network is… sometimes you’re on a site and you see those banners on the right-hand side. Sometimes it’ll take your text ad—your search ad—and it’ll just throw it there. And that’s how they get you to spend your budget.

Ezra McCarthy
And it’s insane because… maybe one—I’m trying to think and I’m trying to think super hard—the amount of times I’ve ever clicked on a banner ad… maybe 20 years ago, when you could get it for like one cent a piece.

Jake Hundley
Yeah. It’s mostly bot traffic. Like, it’s mostly just bots clicking on that. And the worst part about it is, it’s defaulted to select that option. So when you set up the campaign, you have to make sure to uncheck it. And it’s also hidden in a dropdown called “advanced settings,” so you have to open that up and uncheck it—which is ridiculous.

Ezra McCarthy
Especially a lot of these business owners—Google pushes them toward it because they think, “Hey, I’m not experienced, so let’s just go with the smart campaigns.” But then you don’t realize all of that. I think I’m using the terminology right here…

Jake Hundley
Smart campaigns are smart for Google because they prey on business owners who don’t know how to optimize and aren’t willing to spend the time to learn—well, time and money to learn. And so it’s just an easy way. It’s the same thing—smart campaigns are the same thing as boosting posts on Facebook. It’s exactly the same thing.

Ezra McCarthy
And what I tell people is, if your organic is trash—like, fix that first—because you’re going to get the lowest customer acquisition costs if you can rank high with your Google Business Profile and your website. Because at least from what I’ve seen, Google Ads can be very effective—and I’m not telling people not to do it—but you have to go into it, just like you said.

I think you threw out some numbers, and maybe I could ask some more specifics here, but it is probably—what I’ve seen—one of the more expensive, other than postcards, one of the most expensive customer acquisition cost methods. So knowing, when you come in, “Hey, this is the win for me,” is really important. Because then you’ve spent two, three, five, a couple thousand dollars, and you’re like, “Okay, what did I get?”

And then that goes to another thing—if you’re not tracking where leads come from, then you’re not going to know what’s effective or not. So what have you seen for the average customer acquisition costs in the US? Maybe break it down between hardscaping and lawn care, if you know—just in a rough generality—those two.

Jake Hundley
Yeah, so generally it’s the same from what I’ve seen—subjectively. Every year we aggregate all of our data and we see what the average cost per lead is, depending on how we want to slice the data.

This year we did it based on the average budget per month. That’s how we sliced the data. Last year, I believe we did average cost per lead by seasonality, and then we did one by climate zone. We change it every year just to see for ourselves if there are other patterns. For the metrics from 2025 that we’ll report on in 2026, I want to slice it by service.

But subjectively, when I see it, we have a target cost per lead of $100 on Google for all of our clients—regardless of whether you just do lawn maintenance or if you do hardscaping projects. And for hardscaping projects, most of our clients generally meet that. I think there’s only maybe 5% that struggle with it—maybe 5 to 10%.

That said, we do have hardscape clients that are like, “Hey, I’m willing to pay $400 to $500 per lead.” Even if it’s not a close, they’re willing to pay that much because they know their close rates on inbound leads like that.

I was just talking to an organic plant healthcare company in Long Island. I was walking them through the “how much are you willing to pay per lead” exercise, or more accurately, “how much did you pay per lead last year” based on all their marketing spend. They didn’t break it down between Google Ads and organic—just overall. And based on that, they were paying about $400 per lead, and they seemed happy with that.

So, yeah, it’s very high. I was like, well, if you’re happy with that, then it’s going to be a slam dunk for us. Long Island is one of two markets in the U.S. that are really difficult for Google Ads. The other is Denver.

Ezra McCarthy
That’s high.

Jake Hundley
And those are usually the 5 to 10% of our clients that struggle to hit the $100 per lead mark. That’s a good guess—and it’s probably going to be the same guess as Long Island. It’s just super highly competitive and a very affluent area.

North of Denver, like in Greeley, back in 2019 we were getting…

Ezra McCarthy
So just want to ask you—I get Long Island—but why Denver? Or do you know why Denver? Make sense?

Jake Hundley
$30 leads. It was insane. And then we tried it again, I think in 2023 with a different client, and it was totally different—$150 leads. I don’t know if there was a landscaping boom during that time, maybe during COVID. I don’t know.

Ezra McCarthy
One comment here I think is really important: you can’t… and some of these numbers you’re throwing out—I’ve seen it. I was trying to help this guy. He was trying to increase his fert and weed control business, and I was talking to him.

Now fert is obviously completely different, as you know, than lawn care and hardscaping. So your average customer spend per year is… your volume’s higher, but your average customer spend per year is obviously way lower. So it depends where you are.

This gentleman was in Texas. For him, with the lawn sizes there, the customer would spend—not profit, this was gross—six to eight hundred dollars per year. Well, he was spending four to six… or five hundred dollars per—no, per lead. And he was closing 50 percent. So for like four hundred, he spent like eight hundred dollars per customer.

Now, unless you’re a massive company that can just eat losses—because obviously you have in there fuel costs, you have labor costs, you have all the chemicals, etc.—it was just insane.

So we went on his website, and I was trying to walk through the customer journey because I’m like, okay, this is just bonkers. Like, how are you spending that?

And so I went on his website—it was literally impossible for me to fill out his form. Literally. I forget if it was Zoom or phone, I was trying to go through it. It was one of those instant price things, and I won’t name it, because I don’t think it was a problem with the software. I think it was how he set it up—or maybe he canceled his subscription and kept it on his website.

I got the instant quote, which was fine—but I couldn’t go any farther. I couldn’t submit it to him. I couldn’t call. There wasn’t a “Call now and get this.” And I spent a couple of minutes trying to figure it out. Like, this is so frustrating.

And here he was, spending thousands a month, and he didn’t even have it… like—

Jake Hundley
Yeah.

Ezra McCarthy
And he’s like, “Well, I’m just going to lose money for the first year.” I’m like, you’re throwing money away. I’m not saying don’t do Google Ads, but don’t do it like this. So have you seen anything like that as you work with different clients?

Jake Hundley
Yeah. I mean, again, the same organic—this is just off the top of my head. We have over 60 clients. But this one I was talking to—this was Thursday, maybe—they’re part of a bigger, kind of like a lawn care conglomerate. They have multiple businesses under one group.

So I was talking to them about pricing and how it worked. And they threw out a number, like, “Let’s just say we’re spending $10,000 a month. Is this what the pricing looks like?” And I said, “Yeah, I mean, roughly, you’re kind of on the mark.”

Then I stopped for a second and said, “I just want to clarify something though. These are hypothetical numbers, right? You’re not actually spending $10,000 in Long Island, are you?”

And they said, “No, that’s what we spend.” And my brain melted for a second. I was like, you’re just throwing money away.

There are very few markets in the U.S. that can support $10,000 in Google ad spend—unless you have the Search Partners Network or Display Network active. Then you can spend it. I don’t have access to their account, but I was just telling them, “We’ve worked in Long Island before. I know you can’t spend that effectively.”

On top of that, they’re a plant healthcare company. That’s one of the most narrow markets there is. It’s not like they do lawn maintenance and…

Ezra McCarthy
Do you know if they did?

Jake Hundley
And care and landscaping and hardscape—and you do the whole gamut of things—like, you’re very niche in the services. So I asked them, “How many leads are you getting from there?” And there was no… they don’t know. Because when people come onto the website and fill out the form or they call, they just say, “We found you from Google,” or “We found you from the internet.”

Well, absolutely 0% of people are going to say, “I clicked on a Google ad.” So was it organic or was it not? Did they search a brand name, or was it an unbranded keyword?

And that’s probably the biggest thing—related to transparency and tracking—and making sure that’s set up. My partner—different Cody, I think you referenced a Cody earlier on, or were you talking about my partner?

Ezra McCarthy
Actually, don’t remember mentioning a Cody.

Jake Hundley
Man, that’s all right. Maybe I was hearing things. It’s Saturday, right? I’m allowed to just hear things.

So Cody, my partner—we’re actually going to start putting some lawn care CRMs and instant quote platforms on blast on our blog, because everybody wants to use them, all of our clients, because it makes things operationally easier.

Ezra McCarthy
I have a feeling I might know which one of them is.

Jake Hundley
But none of those platforms want to invest in proper tracking. And it’s not even an investment—it’s very simple. You fill out the form, it redirects the user to a thank-you page. Boom. Thank you. We have the thing that we need to track campaigns.

And some clients are like, “Well, you know, tracking isn’t that important. I can always just count things up.” I’m like, our main deliverable to you—our marketing reports—are going to say that you got zero leads.

Ezra McCarthy
Nobody does. No one does.

Jake Hundley
And that’s not a good look for us. Second is, when we run Google Ads or Facebook Ads, we’re going to want to optimize it to deliver to people who are likely to complete the action that we want them to complete.

When we tell Facebook or Google, “The action we want people to complete is loading the thank-you page,” and when people do that through a Google Ad or a Facebook Ad, Google or Facebook are going to say, “Okay, this person completed that conversion action. What does their customer profile look like? What does this person look like? I’m going to start delivering more ads to those kinds of people.”

And if we don’t have a conversion action to tell Google or Facebook, then we can’t optimize the campaigns for that. So then you’re just wasting marketing dollars.

Fortunately, we’ve gotten in with some of the right people at some of those software platforms, where we’ve helped them create a solution. So half of these blog posts are going to be: “Here’s a solution. It’s not pretty, but there’s a solution.” And then the other half is going to be: “This CRM sucks and we don’t recommend it.”

Ezra McCarthy
You know, I’ll reference one I actually do like—but all of them have the same problem. I like Jobber. I recommend it. Some of the other ones are really glitchy, and the UI is terrible, UX is just terrible. But one thing I don’t like about Jobber—which is universal for CRMs—is that they all have this problem. That being said, I like it. I recommend it. I’ve looked at other ones when I’m at a lawn care company, but…

All of them have this problem. It drives me bananas. The minimum you can cut it down to is like 20 questions. And I get it—from a software side, to have everyone be able to customize… code and software is not my thing. But from a designer, from a user experience, having 20 questions on a form—unless you’re so busy that you don’t care if half of them don’t fill it out…

Like, when I go to a company, I don’t want to write a book to get them to call me. Because I know five out of these ten people are not going to call back. Now, hopefully, if you’re listening to this, you’re someone that gets back to your leads really quick.

But that’s why it drives me crazy. And you look at the best example of this—the king of e-commerce, which we’re not e-commerce, but we’re trying to get people to fill out a form—is Amazon. And they have a one-click purchase. Now, I know we can’t do that in our industry, but we shouldn’t have 20 questions.

Jake Hundley
So I’ll tell you why I don’t like Jobber. Because I like the UI. I like it from a CRM perspective. But as soon as clients want to use their form, I’m like, “No, I don’t want to do that.”

Ezra McCarthy
But to push back—every other CRM, which, I mean, I don’t care who my customers use—they need something. Most of them, you gotta use one. Jobber is the best of all of them that I’ve worked with.

Jake Hundley
Yeah. There are two CRMs out there that have proper tracking: Service Autopilot and Copilot.

Ezra McCarthy
So I’ll comment here—their forms are… on the tracking side, you may be right. I like Jonathan—he’s with Service Autopilot. Well, I think he’s kind of still there—but their backend is terrible. Like, I’ve been on the backend and it looks like when it was sold, it hasn’t been touched. Literally.

Jake Hundley
Yeah, no, I agree. The backend is bad, and the tracking—to set it up—is not pretty. But it can be done. Where Jobber—it can’t be done.

Ezra McCarthy
No. And Copilot—the forms are just as bad and… well, I’ll not go into that, but I don’t recommend it. So yes, Jobber has problems. But don’t be discouraged. Like, if you’re listening and using Copilot—look, you need to use something. You need a CRM.

And the nice thing I do like about—I know you just mentioned you use it—NiceJob too. That’s a review automation software, because a huge ranking factor, especially for your Google Business Profile, is reviews. The link from it can integrate so well with Jobber. The backend makes it so good for sending out reviews to customers.

Because like with Service Autopilot—and I presume with Copilot too—you have to export basically a spreadsheet or CSV file.

Jake Hundley
Mm-hmm. Well, there’s a workaround. And the workaround is integrating with QuickBooks. So, everybody uses QuickBooks, pretty much. If you’re using Service Autopilot or Copilot or a CRM that doesn’t play nice with NiceJob, you can loop it through QuickBooks.

Ezra McCarthy
Do you have to use a third-party integration, or can you just go straight from… do you have to use Zapier or something?

Jake Hundley
I believe there’s a direct integration. I believe there’s a direct integration with QuickBooks and NiceJob. We talked with three or four different review generation companies. And NiceJob didn’t even have all the features some of the others had—and it still wasn’t priced as competitively. It is, but I think we ended up wanting to go with… Jobber—keep mixing those up—NiceJob.

Ezra McCarthy
I didn’t know that. I’m going to use that.

Jake Hundley
Yeah, we keep wanting to go with NiceJob because of their cooperation in the industry. They just play nicer with lawn care and landscaping CRMs and things like that. They’re more well known in the industry, so it’s a better partner from an agency perspective.

Ezra McCarthy
It’s a sign. What do you mean by that?

Here’s the thing—why I’m a big fan of it. Like, it does cost—if you buy it yourself, it’s $75 per month. But here’s why I’m a huge fan: I feel like I harp on it so much that people are probably tired of hearing me talk about reviews.

But at this point, we’ve worked with—I was just looking at my Stripe—I have a CRM too, but over a hundred people. We’re not working with a hundred currently at a time, but right now, right around 70.

Of the people that I’ve harassed about it—because every single person, even if I get on a call and they don’t even go with me—I’ll say, “Hey, if you don’t go with me, you really need to work on reviews.”

I could think of maybe three or four that have really implemented getting reviews from their customers. And the ones that have—it’s just nuts, the difference. How it’s helped their business grow, get great organic leads.

Because here’s the thing: if you’ve got five to ten leads coming in per week organically, at $100 per lead, you’re like, “Oh, this is great,” because we’re just adding on top of our organic base.

An example—we’re helping someone out of Pennsylvania. I just talked to him, or texted him this week—I had to look back. He got 28 leads in a day. And he’s not doing PPC. This is organic.

Now, he didn’t get there in a week, or even a month, or even a year. He’s in Pennsylvania—he’s outside of Philadelphia.

Jake Hundley
Mm-hmm. Wait, what state was this in?

Ezra McCarthy
Pennsylvania.

Jake Hundley
It’s so crazy you say that, because when we launch sites in that Northeast area—like Pennsylvania and just the general region—our sites, the leads just skyrocket.

We’ve taken websites that were doing like five leads a month, and then we build the site, and within two weeks they were getting like 70 leads. I tell people this all the time—the Northeast is crazy.

Ezra McCarthy
Yeah, and to be clear—that’s not normal. I don’t…

Jake Hundley
Yeah. But I’m like, so when people ask me, “What can we expect for leads on our new site build?” I’m like, well, it depends on where you are. It depends on a lot of things. But we see markets in the Northeast just absolutely take off. Then we see markets in the Southwest that struggle.Ezra McCarthy
And I think part of it’s just competition. For example, I put up a website in a town of like 2,000 people, and it literally was on the first page of Google in two days. Now, that is not normal—don’t expect that. I’ve seen it take a couple of weeks to a couple of months to index a site. But I’m just saying, competition is a huge factor.

But if you go down South and you’ve got 50 lawn care companies in a town of, you know, 50 people—and some of them are decent size—then obviously competition is such a huge factor.

Jake Hundley
I want to bring it back to Jobber for two things, because I want them to hear this. Number one: I think it’s really stupid that your email can only be associated with one Jobber account and that’s it.

Because if landscaping or lawn care companies are hiring an agency to integrate a form on another website to then be able to track it in their marketing efforts…

Ezra McCarthy
Why would you want more than one?

Jake Hundley
…then they have to give me their personal login information. I can’t be a dev on multiple Jobber accounts. They actually tried to partner with us, like officially partner with us, and I said no—because they refuse to track their forms properly.

And I’m like, I’m not going to partner with you if I can’t track the forms. So, no, I haven’t. Instead, we’re going to write a blog post about it. Just lighting fires, man.

Ezra McCarthy
Have you tried to reach out to them?

Jake Hundley
I think that’s really dumb. I can’t recommend Jobber because I can’t even work in people’s Jobber accounts. They’re totally missing the mark on the consultant industry—on having consultants help bring more people to Jobber. Because now those consultants can’t even use their actual email to help clients in Jobber.

Okay, second thing: tracking Jobber. There is a way to do it, actually. But you have to do it with your current forms—we use Ninja Forms on WordPress. Ninja Forms has a Zapier integration, and then you can use Zapier to push fields to the Jobber request.

But the Zapier integration requires multi-step zaps, which is a professional feature—$20 a month. You can set that multi-step zap where the fields go to Jobber. Then you have to set up the next step to search for an existing user. If the user doesn’t exist, then create a new user.

Then the next step is to map the contact fields to that user. And the next step is to create a request form—or create a request with that user ID.

Where Jobber misses with Zapier is you can’t match the fields on your form to the request fields in Jobber. You can only send data from your website form to the message section at the bottom of the request form in Jobber—and that’s it. You can’t map fields.

Which is fine—it’s not the end of the world. It’s a way to track it and get that contact information. Because the most tedious part about transposing your website form fills into Jobber is getting the contact info and creating the account. And that part it handles fine.

But then the whole request—just the whole request side of it—falls on its face.

Ezra McCarthy
Hmm, interesting. Yeah, and that is good. I think most businesses—even medium-sized ones—aren’t even doing the basics before we get here. So I’m not saying what you’re doing is bad. But I think that’s like 401-level, and most even medium-sized businesses are at…

And what I’m thinking is, if you think of college classes—like 101 is freshman, then 201—most are still at the 101. And this isn’t a bash, they’re just busy running, fighting fires.

Jake Hundley
Yeah.

Ezra McCarthy
And that’s why having someone who knows a little bit more in-depth helps. But some of the problems I have with some of the others—I won’t specify—but I’ve just heard horror stories of double payments and quirky stuff.

And yeah… I won’t name names, because I think they’re getting a lot better, but…

Jake Hundley
Yeah. I don’t really pay attention to that. I just—like—can it track? That’s where my brain goes anytime.

Ezra McCarthy
Yeah, but here’s the thing—if you double charge a client and they get ticked, at that point does it matter that you tracked them? No, because they’re gone.

So that’s where I’m like, okay, yeah, with all the quirks in all of them, that’s what gets me. And the user design—it’s so large. The Jobber forms, all of them—Copilot… I guess I haven’t seen the Element one…

Jake Hundley
Right. Yeah.

Ezra McCarthy
But the specific particular ones I’ve seen—and then you’ve got YardBook. You can’t even embed a form, you can’t get a specific embed form.

Jake Hundley
Yeah, YardBook is a pass. Hard pass for me.

Ezra McCarthy
Yeah, which to me makes no sense.

Jake Hundley
It’s good to use YardBook when you’re just starting out. I think that’s fine.

Ezra McCarthy
Well, here’s the thing though—these are not very expensive to get the lowest tier. I think last I looked it was like 50 bucks or something.

Even if you just started, what people don’t realize is a lot of your value as a lawn and landscape company—especially if you’re doing fert and lawn care—is your customer data and those upselling opportunities.

Even if they don’t go with you—talk about fall aeration—are we following back up with them? Are we emailing them?

Jake Hundley
Mm-hmm.

Ezra McCarthy
Are we texting them? All of these things—they’re losing so much value just because, even though maybe people harp on it and everyone has their code—whatever. Go use something. Whether it’s YardBook, whether it’s Copilot, whether it’s Jobber—like, most businesses, even surprisingly the mid-sized—well, I say mid-sized, like between half a million and a million—some of them still are not. Which is mind-boggling to me.

Jake Hundley
There’s also nothing wrong with using a spreadsheet when you first start too. That’s basically what YardBook is—it’s a spreadsheet with a nicer user interface. But you can also build from it too, though.

Ezra McCarthy
Yeah, but here’s the problem. You say that, and you may start that way for the first five to ten clients. And then when you’re in the middle of spring rush and you’ve got 50, 60 clients and you’re just starting to run around like your head’s cut off—you know, it just…

Jake Hundley
That’s why everybody wants the integrated forms on the site. Because then it’s just like—they don’t have to do it. And I’ve had a lot of clients who will be like—they don’t meet somebody in person and they’ll say, “Go fill out the form on the site.” And that way, they’re in the CRM.

I have to tell them, “Gotta stop doing that, man,” because it’s throwing all our numbers off.

Ezra McCarthy
Yeah. So breaking it down a little bit more into the pay-per-click: I’ve had people ask—can you kind of describe the difference between Local Service Ads—called LSA for short—and a traditional PPC ad, pay-per-click?

When would you recommend a client do LSA compared to PPC? Do you recommend both normally? Or how do you break that down to, say, a five- or ten-year-old?

Jake Hundley
Yeah, so—LSAs are also referred to as Google Guaranteed Ads because sometimes they have that Google Guarantee badge on them.

(By the way, you don’t have to have the Google Guaranteed badge to run the ad.)

But having said that, I think if you’re doing your own marketing—and you’re the one managing it all—do LSAs. It’s pay-per-lead, so you can get a million clicks and no leads and pay nothing.

It comes with some caveats, though. If you turn the messaging feature on—there are two ways people can contact you: they can either call you (which will be tracked and you can listen to recordings), or they can message you.

If you have messaging turned on, Google will recommend other businesses to message to the user. So it’s very much like Angie’s…

Ezra McCarthy
Don’t do that. Angie’s…

Jake Hundley
It’s fine if you respond within like five minutes. If you’re going to respond quickly, it’s fine. If you’re not, you’re going to get charged for a lead and you’re going to miss the lead. So just keep that in mind.

Second thing is, with Google LSAs, there’s no keyword bidding. There’s very little optimization you can do. You can set maximum bid amounts—how much you’re willing to pay for a lead—and set budgets, but that’s about it.

So you don’t have to worry about the things we talked about earlier like Search Partner Network or anything like that.

The problem is, when you select your categories, Google has no idea what landscaping and lawn care categories are. They’ll put sod installation and seeding as one subcategory of lawn care, even though that’s usually a landscaping service.

And then on the flip side of that, they have a subcategory for weed control but not fertilization—which really messes things up for people who can do fertilization but can’t do weed control because they don’t have a herbicide applicator’s license, depending on the state they’re in.

So it can get really finicky when you’re picking the categories you want.

A little tidbit of advice too—if you only do lawn mowing and don’t do any application stuff, you still have to select the lawn care category. But in order to get the Google Guarantee badge for lawn care, you have to have a pesticide applicator’s license and the other licenses that fall under that umbrella.

It’s stupid. I know it’s stupid. Google knows it’s stupid. But that’s just the way it is.

So, if you really want to get that Google Guarantee badge, just go get your applicator’s license. It’s not that difficult.

Now, the Google Guaranteed LSAs can get really good leads depending on where you’re at—like $30 leads, $20 leads. But they can also be expensive—$120, $150—depending on location.

I’d say, if you’re a business running your own ads, go with LSAs.

Now, Google Search Ads—I think we can generally get better results with those. But it requires a lot more optimization and a lot more experience.

As far as who should run what: if you’re with a marketing agency, it’s almost better to just have you do your own LSAs and let the agency handle the Search Ads.

That’s what we recommended for a long time—until recently. Because now everybody’s been asking us to do LSAs. I think it’s just one more item off their plate.

So we started incorporating LSAs as kind of an add-on service. The way we do it is: the clients give us a budget, and then we allocate that budget.

If they’re not getting leads by the 15th of the month, then we can move that budget over to PPC and spend it there.

But there are other things with LSAs too. Your response rate—and how quickly you respond—also affects your cost per lead. You’ll lose in the LSA auction if you’re not quick to respond.

Google has their own CRM too. When you get a lead, they’ll put it into their Google CRM. And you have to update that in a timely manner as well.

So, if you’re not on the ball and you’re too busy in the field, maybe LSAs aren’t great. But otherwise—yeah, it’s just… it’s give and take on each one.

Ezra McCarthy
Something you mentioned there is really important—no matter if you’re doing LSA or traditional PPC—lead-to-speed.

I remember when I first started, I was doing HomeAdvisor. I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s, in my opinion, a terrible business model. But it did teach me a couple of really important things.

Because the way that worked—at least a couple of years ago—it’s the same now: you would pay a yearly fee to be on their platform, and then you’d pay per lead that came in.

So back then, the cheapest lead in the category I was in—which wouldn’t come very often—could be from $18 to $70. Now that doesn’t sound bad, but the leads that were coming in were just trash. There were a few good ones, but you would literally have to respond within minutes.

So I set it up so I’d get a text to my phone, and I’d literally call them within minutes.

I don’t recommend HomeAdvisor, but something that’s really important that I learned then is—especially in our industry—most people don’t pick up the phone. Most people are either not very good at getting back to people, or they’re so busy that they just don’t.

So if you can be the first person to call back—I saw a stat, and I’m going to butcher it—but it basically said the majority of people will just go with the first person that gets back to them.

If you look professional, do a great job, and call them back within minutes—if not within 10, even 15 minutes—you’re going to lower your lead cost and your customer acquisition cost just by doing that simple thing.

Whether you’re outsourcing it—obviously the best is in-house—or if you’re hiring people overseas and their whole job is to call back leads and answer the phone, there are so many options today. There’s just no reason not to do it.

You can be doing everything right here, but if you wait two days to get back to a lead—they’re just gone.

Jake Hundley
Mm-hmm. Yep. I’ve seen a lot of solutions—everything from offshore call centers to using AI autoresponders. And honestly, I haven’t historically been a firm believer in responding to people in minutes—until recently.

Ezra McCarthy
Why?

I’m curious—why in the world would you not want to respond to people in minutes?

Jake Hundley
Because it didn’t used to always be that way. It used to be that if somebody filled out a form on the website, they didn’t want to talk to you right then. Like, they were doing it as a way to say, “Hey, call me back. I just need to reach out so you can get back to me.”

Timeliness was still a factor—it wasn’t like, “I’ll get back to you next week”—but the goal was to respond within 24 hours. That was considered good.

And that’s kind of how we had it at Evergrow too. Sometimes I’ll be editing a podcast episode and I’ll see a lead come in, and I’ll call them right away. And they’re like, “Whoa, I didn’t expect to get a call back.” I’m like, “Well, yeah.”

Sometimes they even feel bad too—they’re probably in their truck or just getting ready to leave, and they fill out a form thinking, “They’ll call me back in a day.”

But with the lawn care and landscaping industry, I first saw the shift—not firsthand, since I’ve never owned a lawn care or landscaping business—but I noticed it through the data and platforms we use.

Platforms like Yelp Ads, LSAs, and even Angie’s—they reward you with cheaper leads the faster you respond. So like, if your lead cost is $70 on Angie’s, that might be because you historically don’t respond quickly enough, especially compared to your competitors.

Ezra McCarthy
Interesting.

Jake Hundley
I don’t know how their algorithm determines that, but yeah—Google’s the same way. In Google’s own documentation, they say they will punish you in lead costs if you don’t respond quickly.

Ezra McCarthy
And the customer does too.

Personally, when I get a lead, I try to—sometimes you can’t, you know, you’re in the middle of something—but I try to get back as fast as possible.

Most people—maybe some think it’s weird—but most are pleasantly surprised.

Because here’s what I found: when I had a business and I was trying to find a website designer, I reached out to like ten… and maybe two got back to me. And what they were offering wasn’t that great—it was overpriced or just ridiculous.

So if you can get back to someone quickly and you have a great product…

Ezra McCarthy
I mean, how are you going to compete? Because you’ve already introduced yourself. So now, instead of just, “I need someone,” every person that calls after that—you’re comparing them. “Well, this person called back right away. That’s great. I don’t think they’re going to ghost me when the project’s done.”

So in my opinion, I don’t see a whole lot of downside. And the people that are thrown off because I called them too quickly—then they’re probably not a great fit anyway.

Jake Hundley
Yeah, there’s—like, I don’t want to say there’s ever a downside to doing it quicker—but I’m also a skeptic. So whenever I hear new data or statistics on something—or not even data, just something subjective—I immediately don’t buy it. I have to prove it.

So like, one of the things is people saying, “Make sure you have a form fill above the fold of the website.” We’ve tested it, and it’s just simply not true—at least not in our industry.

Just having a button above the fold, maybe to click to the contact page—that’s totally fine.

And I know the study that people reference when they say that—it’s from like 2008. Maybe 2012. And it’s for e-commerce.

Every industry is different. Every context is different. So when you hear something like, “Oh, it’s really important that you do XYZ for your close rates,” I just immediately don’t believe it and say, “Well, maybe—but I’ve got to test it first.”

Ezra McCarthy
Agreed.

And you know, I used to think that too—put the form on every page, like the literal form—and a button. And what I found is, when I changed it, nothing changed. I didn’t see a drop.

So I changed my opinion.

Especially as you work with the same industry over and over and over again, you’re going to see some patterns. And that’s where working with a specific agency—whether it’s Evergrow or another company…

Jake Hundley
Yeah. Yeah.

Ezra McCarthy
Working with someone who’s specific—because I was just talking to a guy yesterday, and he’s going to go with this national brand. And they’re trying to convince him that he needs to be optimizing for AI search.

Now, do I think AI search is a real thing? Yes—I use it every day. But I’ve tested it for local services, and we have a long way to go. It’s terrible. Optimize for search.

Jake Hundley
Do you know how you optimize for AI search? Optimize for search. That’s all you gotta do.

We’ve gotten two leads in the last month from ChatGPT at our agency. And I posted it on Reddit, and they were like, “Whoa, what did you do? How did you do this?” And I said, “I did nothing. They just came in.”

Ezra McCarthy
Ha! I believe it. But here’s the thing—for these business owners, they’re getting sucked into this. All the rage is AI—which I use every day, it’s amazing. But like…

Jake Hundley
This is 2017 voice search—when Gary Vee was promoting that like crazy.

Ezra McCarthy
It’s so stupid. Voice search is dumb. I have never in my life—honestly, Siri… well, maybe compared to ChatGPT voice—which I use a lot. ChatGPT voice, or whatever they call it, is like 10 times better than Siri.

I find myself getting frustrated. I don’t even use Siri—it’s terrible in comparison.

Jake Hundley
Yeah. We don’t use it. We don’t even use a ton of AI search.

On our podcast, we just interviewed a guy who has a national brand as well. And for anybody listening—I don’t have a podcast for landscaping or lawn care businesses. Cody and I have it for other agencies.

And he was asking me—towards the end, we got into a sales match. He goes, “Who do you think would win a sale for a landscaping company—us or you?”

We’re probably going to close this year just south of a million—maybe three-quarters of a million—so we’re relatively small. And they were doing, I think, like eight or nine million. Much larger team than us.

And I said, “Oh, I think I’d win every time.” And he was like, “Really?” He was really—

Ezra McCarthy
Thank—

Jake Hundley
And then we kind of got into this back and forth, and he goes, “You think you’d win the sale?” I said, “No, no, no—I don’t think I’d win the sale every time. But I think we would outperform you every time.”

And he goes, “Man, I want to bring my partner in and discuss this more.” Because at the end of the day, it’s just local search. Like, yeah, you might be able to launch a campaign and kickstart things a month and a half faster than us—but give us two or three months, and we’d be on the same page.”

And I said, “Maybe. But then you’re going to start falling behind.”

Because when you A/B test things in an account, you can only A/B test one thing at a time—you have to isolate all the other variables.

Last year, I had 61 accounts. Which means I can A/B test 61 different things—and then roll the winners out to all the other accounts. And we can just keep doing that over and over again.

Ezra McCarthy
And I 100% agree. Here’s the thing—I was just, to be honest, I almost went to a BNI meeting. And then I thought to myself, “Okay, this doesn’t make sense.”

Because we do sometimes work with other types of businesses—but we’re not seeking them. And it takes our team members twice as long to do all the services.

So if you’re a generalist agency—if you’re trying to help a hair salon, and then trying to help a lawn and landscape owner—you’re not going to know what aeration or overseeding is.

Jake Hundley
Mm-hmm.

Ezra McCarthy
Most consumers don’t know the intricacies of, “How do you market fertilization and weed control?”

Fertilization and weed control is in a funny little niche on Google. Because if you type in “fertilization,” you’re going to get a fertility clinic. Well, obviously a lawn and landscape company does not need that kind of customer.

And so little intricacies like that—a national brand just can’t… you can’t train your employees to know how to navigate that.

Jake Hundley
But maybe people…

Ezra McCarthy
…and then try to advertise a perm or whatever.

Jake Hundley
People searching for fertility clinics have money though—just think about that.

Ezra McCarthy
Yeah, but if they’re looking for IVF treatment, they’re probably not looking for lawn care.

Jake Hundley
I totally forgot—I lost my train of thought, I’m sorry. I do this all the time. No, I remember what I was going to say.

I also think niche agencies—we can just be cheaper and more affordable. I was making this argument to Cody—well, not an argument, I was just telling him—and he agreed. I said, “No generalist agency can outperform a niche agency and be lower cost.”

Ezra McCarthy
No.

Jake Hundley
They can’t be lower cost because generalist agencies have to go through their whole discovery and strategy process, learning period, and everything else. They don’t have a systematized process from one e-comm account to a local business account. It’s totally different.

On top of that, they have to pay people a lot more—strategists who have actual marketing degrees. Whereas when you’re a niche agency and everything is so productized, one thing that works for one account works for the next account.

You don’t have to bring in high-cost talent—you can train talent. And just by nature of that system, and that assembly-line style of service, we can be more affordable and deliver better results than generalist agencies.

However—where we drop the ball as a niche agency is when we take on accounts outside our niche. That’s where we start bleeding internal resources and money. Because now we’re spending double the time on an account for a productized service that our business model wasn’t structured for.

Ezra McCarthy
So true.

And I describe it this way: we’ve done other websites for other people, but I can take a lawn and landscape company—we don’t do it all in the first call—but I can have an intake call, take 30 minutes or less, and make a website that fits their needs.

Like, just asking the questions—“What do you want?” If I was working in some random industry, it’s going to take a couple of hours, maybe a couple of discovery calls. We’d really have to dig into it.

But we’ve seen, at this point—we’ve helped 70, 80-plus lawn and landscape businesses specifically—and we’ve seen them have great results.

So we can say, “Hey, we know this works.” Not just “we’ll tell you,” but “we’ll show you.”

Here’s what it’s done. This is how they 2x’d or 3x’d their leads. This is how they grew their business. Not just “this is what I’m telling you,” but “here are the results.”

And as a generalist agency, you’re not going to be able to do that. Because you’re going to be like, “Here, here, here, here”—you can’t have expertise in all the micro-niches.

So a little off-topic… but yeah, it’s kind of getting long here. So let’s break it down—so the poor listener doesn’t get overwhelmed. If a lawn and landscape…

Jake Hundley
Man, our episodes are like an hour and a half—two hours sometimes.

Ezra McCarthy
Boy… my poor hosting bill.

If a lawn and landscape business owner is kind of on the fence, wondering, “Is this right for my business?”—who is the right client to run PPC? And perhaps, who is the right client for Evergrow if they’re needing some help? Who would be a right fit for your business?

Jake Hundley
So we always have a minimum we recommend people be at in business before hiring an agency. And this is just our personal belief—but I think your business should be doing about $200,000 in revenue before hiring an agency.

That doesn’t mean you can’t—and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t—but we know our costs are already relatively low. And what ends up happening is we start pausing and stopping campaigns when cash flow is low.

Some agencies might be okay with facilitating that, but we’re getting to a point in our size where we don’t recommend it. It’s better to just have your ads running continuously and treat your marketing budget like an actual budget—not just what’s left over.

So make sure that’s allocated. And usually, that kind of allocation—at what we cost, which is $900 a month minimum—should be just part of your marketing budget. And that shouldn’t be 100% of your budget.

Your full marketing budget should also include postcards, t-shirts, and other things.

Now, as far as ideal clients:
If you want to have regular meetings with your agency—weekly, bi-weekly, or even monthly on a set schedule—we’re not your guys.

We want people to treat us more like their accountant, at least when it comes to Google Ads and SEO. We set the accounts up, everything is optimized and delivering leads, you’re getting ROI, and we send you a monthly report. You know that part of your business is taken care of, and you can focus on other things.

Do clients talk to me every day? Absolutely. Everyone has my number, my email, my cell. But we don’t schedule recurring meetings. So if that’s your style, we’re probably not the right fit.

Now, once you start doing more things with us—like Facebook Ads, radio, or TV—that’s when we’ll need to bug you more. That’s when more meetings make sense. But for those just starting with SEO and Google Ads—it’s more about ongoing maintenance and management, not constant updates.

Ezra McCarthy
Yeah, thanks, Jake. I think this has been really helpful for the listener. If this is something they’re interested in, where’s the best place to find you?

Jake Hundley
You can always go to our website at evergrowmarketing.com. All the contact information is there. And my email is super easy—it’s just jake@evergrowmarketing.com.

Ezra McCarthy
Thanks. Hopefully, this has provided great value to you. If this has been helpful, please scroll down, click follow, and leave a rating and review—it helps bring on other great guests… or maybe just “great” guests. Maybe I shouldn’t describe it like that—I couldn’t resist!

And we’ll see you on the next one.

Jake Hundley

Hahaha.