Machina
Timber framing of a new California home at golden hour, with construction workers silhouetted against oak-covered Central Coast hills

Construction & Trades

Construction & Trades Marketing Agency That Keeps Your Crews Booked

Machina is a growth marketing agency in Hollister that keeps contractor schedules full across California's Central Coast: Local Services Ads, local SEO, review velocity, and speed-to-lead automation, all measured in cost per booked job. We took 101 Exterminators, a Salinas home-services company, from $120K to $6.8M in two years.

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Proof

Results, measured the way you measure

Booked work and revenue, in the clients' own numbers. Read the full case studies.

Home Services

101 Exterminators

56x
Revenue growth

Pest control is a trades business: trucks, routes, emergency calls. Local SEO with 25+ city pages and an AI agent answering in under 30 seconds took a Salinas shop from $120K to $6.8M in two years.

Read the case study

Operations

B2B Services Company

48h → 5min
Lead response time

A B2B operations build, on the same clock contractors live by: 78% of homeowners hire the first responder, so we cut lead response from 48 hours to 5 minutes.

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E-commerce

Apparel Brand

$541K
Email revenue

An apparel brand, not a trade, but the same database play that carries contractors through the shoulder season: $541K in email revenue from a list the brand already owned.

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What makes Construction & Trades different

The conditions this trade runs under

California's CSLB licenses roughly 285,000 contractors across 45 classifications, the most crowded contractor market in the country, and Central Coast search results show it. Google Guaranteed screening and opaque LSA ranking factors decide who sits at the top of the page. 87% of homeowners skip anything rated under 4 stars, so one rough review month costs real jobs. HVAC search demand drops 65–75% in the shoulder seasons. We build plans that hold up under all of it.

What we hear

What contractors tell us on the first call

Four complaints we hear from owners across the Central Coast, and what we do about each.

“I'm paying Angi for leads they sold to six other contractors”

Shared-lead platforms sell one homeowner to as many as 15 pros, and reported ghost rates on Thumbtack run near 75%. We build exclusive demand instead, through your own Local Services Ads and search campaigns, so every lead calls you and only you.

Paid Ads

“By the time we call back, they've hired someone else”

78% of homeowners hire the first company to respond, and the average shop takes 3.7 hours. Our AI answering and missed-call text-back reply in seconds and book straight into ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, or Jobber.

AI Automation

“Every February the phones go quiet”

HVAC search demand drops 65–75% in the shoulder seasons, so waiting on Google guarantees the slump. Email and SMS campaigns to your own customer list book tune-ups and agreement renewals 60 days before the peak, at near-zero cost.

Email Marketing

“A worse contractor outranks us in the map pack”

The map pack appears on 93% of local-intent searches, and it rewards review velocity, profile completeness, and city-level content more than craftsmanship. We fix those three signals city by city until you own your service area.

SEO

What we do

Five services, priced in your economics

Lead costs, ticket sizes, seasonality, and the review war. Every service below is built around the numbers a contractor runs on.

Web Development

A contractor site is conversion infrastructure, not a brochure. We build sub-3-second mobile pages with sticky click-to-call, your CSLB license and insurance above the fold, real crew and job photos, financing CTAs, and a city page for every service area. Home-services paid traffic converts around 7.3% on average; a purpose-built trades site is the difference between 3% and 10% on the same ad spend.

SEO

Local SEO is the one channel where your lead cost falls over time: mature contractor programs deliver leads at $10–$50, against $228 for a roofing search ad. The work is Google Business Profile optimization, review velocity, NAP citations, and city and service pages for Hollister, Gilroy, Salinas, and Monterey. The map pack appears on 93% of local-intent searches. Winning it is the whole game.

Paid Ads

LSA first, PPC second. Local Services Ads run $39–$162 per lead by trade, with the Google Guaranteed badge at the top of the page, and you pay per lead rather than per click. Search campaigns catch the replacement and emergency queries LSA misses, geo-fenced tight because electrician clicks cost $12.18. We dispute unqualified leads (6–7% of spend comes back as credits) and report cost per booked job.

Email Marketing

Your customer list is the off-season insurance policy. We run tune-up campaigns 60 days before summer and winter peaks, maintenance-agreement renewal sequences, review requests within 24 hours of job close, and dormant-customer reactivation. Re-engaging a past customer costs near zero; buying that same homeowner back through ads costs $80–$228. For remodel and ADU builders, nurture sequences hold the 3–9 month decision window.

AI Automation

Speed-to-lead is the highest-leverage automation in the trades: 78% of homeowners hire the first responder, the average shop takes 3.7 hours, and 41% of jobs get booked after hours. We deploy missed-call text-back, AI phone answering that books directly into ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, or Jobber, and automated review requests. For 101 Exterminators, average response time now sits under 30 seconds.

Who we work with

Who we work with

Trade by trade, the math changes, and so does the plan.

HVAC

Coastal Monterey flattens the classic AC curve, but Hollister and Salinas heat waves still spike emergency demand, and Santa Cruz's 2026 Title 24 updates open a heat-pump retrofit lane. LSA leads run about $80.

Plumbing

$69 LSA leads with pure emergency intent. Water-heater and repipe jobs go to whoever answers first, which makes plumbing marketing an automation problem as much as an ads problem.

Electrical

Clicks cost $12.18, among the priciest in home services, while panel upgrades and electrification demand climb. Tight geo-targeting and negative keywords decide whether campaigns pencil.

Roofing

The most expensive lead in the trades: $162 on LSA, $228 on search ads. Against an $8,000–$15,000 job the math still works; wasted clicks are what break it.

General contractors & remodelers

Santa Cruz homes average $1.45M, so owners remodel and add ADUs instead of moving. The 3–9 month decision cycle rewards nurture sequences and proof galleries over emergency tactics.

Pest control & home services

Recurring routes and quarterly contracts change the acquisition math. Our deepest result lives here: 101 Exterminators, Salinas, $120K to $6.8M in two years.

AI visibility

AI Search Visibility for Contractors

Homeowners have started asking AI assistants the question they used to type into Google: who should I call. The answer engines build their recommendations from the same raw material as the map pack: review count and rating, complete business profiles, and pages that answer questions in plain, crawlable HTML. That last part trips up plenty of contractor sites: AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript, so proof buried in scripts never gets quoted. We structure your pages, entity data, and review corpus so the machines can read and cite you. When someone asks ChatGPT for the best roofer in Salinas, we make sure it's you. Our free SEO report scores your AI visibility today, before we touch anything.

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56x

Revenue growth in two years. 101 Exterminators, Salinas.

78%

of homeowners hire the first contractor to respond

<30s

average lead response time we build

A $162 lead on an $8,000 roof is the cheapest thing in your business. Letting it ring through to voicemail is the most expensive.

Case study

From a guy with a truck to $6.8M across four counties

101 Exterminators is a Salinas pest-control company, which is to say a trades business: trucks, routes, licenses, emergency calls, and a phone that decides everything. When Machina started, the company did $120K a year. Two years later it did $6.8M, averaging $567K a month. The build is the same system we run for contractors. Local SEO with 25+ city pages across Monterey, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, and San Benito counties. A Google Business Profile that holds the map pack. An AI text agent that answers new leads in under 30 seconds, qualifies 73% of them, and books at 4.2x the rate of manual follow-up. Lifecycle automation gets 42% email opens, 78% SMS reads, and 62% of customers re-booking. The system made sure the work never stopped coming.

Read the case study
$120K → $6.8M
Annual revenue in two years
“Machina didn't just build us a website — they built us a business. The combination of the AI systems, the community work, and the digital marketing turned us from a guy with a truck into the company everyone calls first. We went from surviving to thriving.”
Marcus Rivera, Owner · 101 Exterminators

The Booked-Job System

How we work

The Booked-Job System: three phases, one metric. Cost per booked job.

01

Find the leaks

A free audit of the whole funnel: LSA setup, Google Business Profile, review velocity, site conversion, and how fast your team answers a lead. Most shops lose more jobs to slow response than to weak marketing, so we measure that first.

02

Build exclusive demand

Local Services Ads and search campaigns go live in week one for leads within days. City pages, review systems, and Google Business Profile work compound underneath, pulling your lead cost down toward the $10–$50 SEO range over time.

03

Answer and attribute everything

Speed-to-lead automation answers in seconds and books into your field software. Call tracking ties every booked job to its channel, so when a slow month comes you cut the right budget instead of the wrong one.

Playbook

The Contractor Marketing Playbook

The US home services market reached $97.16 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $194.73 billion by 2035, per Expert Market Research. More money is chasing the same homeowners; lead costs rose 10.51% in a year (LocaliQ). Ten tactics we run for Central Coast contractors, each with the math attached.

01

Claim the Google Guaranteed badge before your competitor does

Local Services Ads sit above every other result and charge per lead, not per click. 2025 cost per lead by trade: plumbing $69, HVAC $80, fencing $71, roofing $162, landscaping $39, per The Media Captain's dataset of 100+ clients (August 2025). More than 90% of LSA leads arrive as phone calls, and about 28% of searchers click an LSA first, second only to the map pack. Verification (license, insurance, background checks) takes weeks, so start before the season you need it. And Google refunds unqualified leads only when someone disputes them; typical recovery runs 6–7% of spend, which pays for the person doing the disputing. For emergency trades, LSA is the first dollar we spend.
02

Answer in five minutes or hand the job away

78% of homeowners hire the first company to respond, and leads answered within 5 minutes convert about 21x better than slower replies (LeadWinner, 2025). The average home-services company takes 3.7 hours (ServiceTitan). That gap is the cheapest growth in this industry, because 41% of jobs get booked after hours, when your office is dark and your competitor's answering service is awake. The fix is plumbing, not marketing: missed-call text-back on every line, AI answering that books directly into ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, or Jobber, and a 5-minute SLA on every form fill. We built this for 101 Exterminators; their average response now sits under 30 seconds, and 73% of inbound leads get qualified automatically.
03

Win the map pack one city at a time

93% of local-intent searches trigger a map pack, and "near me" service searches have grown more than 400% in two years. The pack ranks on proximity, review signal, and profile completeness, so the play is city by city, not sitewide. Build a real page for each service area (Hollister, Gilroy, Salinas, San Juan Bautista) with local jobs, local photos, and the license classes you hold. Complete your Google Business Profile down to services and weekly posts: complete profiles make customers 2.7x more likely to trust a business and 70% more likely to visit. Keep name, address, and phone identical across every citation. This is slow, compounding work, and it is why mature contractor SEO delivers leads at $10–$50 while roofing search ads charge $228.
04

Run review velocity like a production schedule

91% of homeowners read reviews before picking a contractor, and 87% won't consider anything under 4 stars, per ACHR News (2024). Review count, rating, recency, and response speed also feed LSA and map-pack rankings, so reviews are ranking fuel and conversion asset at once. Treat the request as a job-close step: it goes out within 24 hours of the final walkthrough, by SMS, from the tech the customer met. Velocity beats totals; a steady drip of weekly reviews outranks a stale pile of 200. Respond to all of them, including the angry ones, because homeowners read the responses. If a competitor is stacking fake reviews, report them through Google's redressal form instead of matching them.
05

Split the paid budget 60/40, LSA to search

Search ads catch what LSA misses: replacement research, brand comparisons, and emergency queries typed instead of tapped. The 2025 benchmarks across 3,211 US home-services campaigns: $7.85 average CPC, 7.33% conversion rate, $90.92 cost per lead, with CPL up 10.51% year over year (LocaliQ). Roofing leads cost $228 from search, and electrician clicks run $12.18, so profitability lives in the boring work: tight geo-fencing around your real service area, negative keywords that block DIY and job-seeker queries, and call-only campaigns after hours. Shops running both channels allocate roughly 60% of paid budget to LSA and 40% to standard PPC, per The Media Captain. Rebalance seasonally; February's budget should not look like July's.
06

Use Angi and Thumbtack as overflow, not foundation

Shared-lead platforms sell one homeowner to as many as 15 contractors. Documented ghost rates on Thumbtack run near 75%, and Angi's math ($20–$120 per lead plus $250–$600 monthly fees at typical 5% close rates) works out to roughly $1,000 per closed job, per Hook Agency, Savu, and WorkZen reviews (2025–2026). The strategic problem is worse than the unit economics: every dollar spent there builds their brand in your city, not yours. Keep an account for overflow weeks if the margin holds. Meanwhile move the core budget into channels you own: your LSA profile, your rankings, your customer list. Exclusive demand compounds. Rented demand resets to zero the day you stop paying.
07

Sell the maintenance agreement in July, market the replacement in February

HVAC alone is a $156.2 billion industry across 117,449 US contractor businesses, per Leads4Build (2025), and most of those shops starve in the same months: search demand drops 65–75% in the shoulder seasons. The Central Coast softens this, since Monterey's mild coast flattens the AC curve, but Hollister, Salinas, and Paso Robles still spike with inland heat waves. The counter is your database. Sell the maintenance agreement while the customer is happy at peak; the renewals become your shoulder-season floor. Then run email and SMS tune-up campaigns to your list 60 days before each peak, when replacement buyers decide calmly. Reactivating a past customer costs near zero. Buying the same homeowner back through ads costs $80–$228.
08

Put your CSLB number where the homeowner can see it

California's CSLB licenses roughly 285,000 contractors across 45 classifications, so a homeowner comparing three bids in Gilroy assumes nothing. 74% of homeowners consult multiple platforms before contacting anyone, and your site is where that comparison quietly ends. Ours convert because they are built like dispatch tools: pages load in under 3 seconds on a phone, the call button follows the thumb, the CSLB license number and insurance sit above the fold, and the photos show your crew on your jobs, not stock models in clean gloves. Home-services paid traffic converts around 7.3% on average, per LocaliQ (2025); a site built this way is the difference between 3% and 10% on identical ad spend.
09

Build pages for the work the Central Coast is permitting

Santa Cruz's average home price hit $1.45M in 2025, per Redfin, so owners remodel and add ADUs instead of moving, and Monterey and Santa Cruz county jurisdictions fast-track ADU permits under the 2023–2031 RHNA cycle, which forces them to plan tens of thousands of new units. Santa Cruz's 2026 Title 24 updates push heat-pump and electrification retrofits. The CZU burn zones still generate rebuild and wildfire-hardening work, and the Salinas Valley adds ag-industrial jobs: coolers, packing sheds, well and pump service. Each of those is a page, a search campaign, and a proof gallery. "ADU builder Santa Cruz" and "heat pump installer rebate California" are queries with permits behind them.
10

Report cost per booked job, or you will cut the wrong budget

Cost per lead is a vanity number in the trades; a $69 lead nobody answers costs you the whole job. Wire call tracking to every channel and pipe form fills into the CRM, so each booked job carries its source. Then budget with intent: established shops defending a territory spend 5–8% of gross revenue on marketing, growth-mode shops 10–15%, per standard home-services guidance from WebFX and Hook Agency. The payoff comes in the slow months. Owners without attribution cut whatever feels expensive, which is usually the SEO quietly producing their cheapest jobs. Owners with attribution cut the channel that stopped booking.

Sources

  1. Google Local Services Ads cost per lead by trade: roofing $162, HVAC $80, fencing $71, plumbing $69, painting $40, landscaping $39 (The Media Captain, 100+ client dataset, August 2025).
  2. Home services search ads average $7.85 per click, a 7.33% conversion rate, and $90.92 per lead, with cost per lead up 10.51% year over year (LocaliQ analysis of 3,211 US campaigns, 2025).
  3. 91% of homeowners rely on online reviews before picking a contractor, and 87% avoid contractors rated below 4 stars (ACHR News, 2024).
  4. 78% of buyers choose the first company to respond, average home-services response time is 3.7 hours (ServiceTitan), and leads answered within 5 minutes convert about 21x better (LeadWinner, 2025).
  5. The US home services market was valued at $97.16 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $194.73 billion by 2035 (Expert Market Research, 2025).
  6. US HVAC contractors generate $156.2 billion in 2025 revenue across 117,449 businesses (Leads4Build, 2025).
  7. California's Contractors State License Board licenses roughly 285,000 contractors across 45 classifications (CSLB, 2025).

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Agriculture

The Salinas Valley operations whose coolers and packing sheds contractors build. We market both sides of that job.

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Construction & Trades

Let's have your summer booked before the first Hollister heat wave

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Last updated July 4, 2026