Every term a concrete contractor runs into when buying marketing, defined in plain language, with a line on why it actually matters. If somebody uses one of these to make something sound complicated, this page is the translation.
What you paid in marketing divided by the number of enquiries it produced.
The number every agency quotes because it is the most flattering one available. On its own it says nothing about whether the lead was real or whether it became work.
Marketing spend divided by the number of estimate appointments that actually happened.
The first honest checkpoint. A cheap lead that never turns into an appointment is not cheap.
Marketing spend divided by the number of contracts signed from it.
The only acquisition number that matters. Judge every channel and every proposal on this, never on cost per lead.
The share of estimates you give that turn into signed work.
Under about 25% and no amount of ad spend fixes the business. Most residential concrete contractors land between 25% and 40%.
How long between an enquiry arriving and a human contacting them.
The single biggest lever on close rate in this trade. The drop-off after the first fifteen minutes is steep, because the homeowner contacted two other companies in the same sitting.
What is left of a job after materials and labour, before overhead.
Revenue multiples flatter everybody. Gross margin is the number that decides what you can afford to pay to win a job.
The most you can spend winning a job before it stops being worth having.
A working rule is 20% of gross profit. On a $6,000 job at a 30% margin that is about $360.
The block of three businesses with a map that appears above the organic results on a local search.
Where most concrete searches actually end. A well-run profile ranking second here beats a beautiful website ranking fourth organically, and it costs nothing per lead.
The free business listing that feeds the map pack and Google Maps.
Usually the highest-return marketing asset a concrete contractor owns, and the one most often set up once and never touched again.
How close your business location is to the person searching.
A real map pack ranking factor you cannot bid past. The workaround is genuine local relevance: a real page for that city, reviews mentioning it, and jobs photographed there.
A Google listing that hides its address and lists the areas it serves instead.
The correct setup if customers do not come to your yard. Publishing a home address you do not operate from invites a competitor to report you.
The rate at which new reviews arrive, rather than the total.
Two or three a month reads as a currently-trading business. A hundred reviews that all arrived two years ago reads as one that might have stopped.
The work that makes a business rank in a specific geography: the profile, location pages, on-page structure and local authority.
Slower than ads to start and it does not stop when you stop paying. That trade-off is the whole reason to run both.
Near-identical pages made for different cities with only the place name swapped.
Google filters them and they can drag the rest of your domain down. If you cannot write 600 genuinely different words about a market, do not publish that page.
Google ads that sit above the search results, charge per lead rather than per click, and carry the Google Guaranteed badge.
Volume and a trust signal with almost no targeting control. Run them alongside Search rather than instead of it, and dispute every bad lead.
Terms you tell Google never to show your ads for.
The highest-return hour you will spend on a concrete account. "Concrete" also appears in countertops, planters, mix ratios and first-year engineering coursework.
Google’s rating of how well your ad, keyword and landing page match the search.
Better landing pages lower what you pay per click and raise how often you convert, at the same time. It compounds in both directions.
Sending signed-job outcomes back into Google Ads so bidding optimises toward revenue.
The difference between an account that gets cheaper over time and one that gets more expensive. It is why weekly outcome reporting is part of the program.
An enquiry sold by a platform to several contractors at once.
Worth roughly a quarter of an exclusive lead, and it arrives with price pressure attached because three other people are calling within the hour.
How long until the main content of a page is visible.
Under 2.5 seconds is the target. Above about four seconds a measurable share of visitors leave before they have seen any of your work.
How much the page jumps around while it loads.
Caused mostly by images without declared dimensions. It is the difference between a site that feels built and one that feels thrown together.
Structured data in the page telling search engines what a business is, where it works and what it sells.
Invisible to visitors, and how you appear correctly in search features. Never mark up reviews that belong to a different business.
Opening a page with a direct 40 to 60 word answer before any preamble.
AI assistants extract passages rather than pages. This is what gets your page quoted instead of a competitor’s.
A page dedicated to one thing you sell, written for the search that brings that buyer.
One combined services page gives search engines nothing specific to rank and gives the reader filtering work they will not do.
Send us your city and we will come back with what your market actually costs, in the same plain language as this page.
