25 terms
Contractor marketing, defined
Every term we use, written out in full: what it means, how it works, what it is worth to a contractor, and who to check it against. It grows every week, and each entry links to the articles that use it.
Recently defined
Suffolk County home improvement license
The license Suffolk County requires of contractors performing home improvement work on Long Island, issued by its Office of Consumer Affairs rather than by New York State.
Residential specialty contractor
South Carolina's registration for trades doing specialized work on residential property — plumbing, electrical, HVAC, roofing, painting and the rest — administered by LLR.
Reputation management software
Software that asks customers for reviews automatically, collects them in one place, and helps you respond — usually bundled with business texting and web chat.
New Jersey home improvement contractor registration
The registration New Jersey requires of anybody selling or performing home improvement work, issued by the Division of Consumer Affairs and identified by a number beginning 13VH.
ServiceTitan
Field service management software aimed at larger residential HVAC, plumbing and electrical contractors, with dispatch, marketing attribution and reporting built in.
AI chatbot
A chat window on your website answering visitors' questions with an AI model, usually with the goal of capturing a name and number.
A
- AI chatbot
- A chat window on your website answering visitors' questions with an AI model, usually with the goal of capturing a name and number.
- AI Overviews
- The AI-written answer Google shows above the ordinary search results, assembled from pages it has crawled and frequently citing a handful of them.
- AI photo tagging
- Software that looks at job site photographs and labels them automatically — by phase, trade, room, condition or damage — so they can be found later without anybody sorting them.
- AI receptionist
- Software that answers your phone in a synthetic voice, works out what the caller wants, and books, qualifies or routes the call without a person on the line.
- AI review response
- Software that drafts replies to customer reviews, usually inside a reputation platform, for a person to approve or send automatically.
- AI-generated imagery
- Pictures produced by software rather than a camera — including a "before" that never existed and an "after" that has not been built.
- Answer engine optimization
- Shaping content so that AI answer engines cite your business, as distinct from traditional SEO, which aims to rank a page in a list of links.
- Ask Maps
- Google's conversational layer inside Maps, which answers natural-language questions about places by summarizing listings, reviews and photos rather than returning a list.
B
- Before-and-after post
- A pair of photographs of the same space, taken from the same position before work started and after it finished.
C
- Conversation intelligence
- Software that records and transcribes your phone calls and then analyses them — flagging booked jobs, missed opportunities, and which advertising the caller came from.
D
- Direction requests
- A count, reported by Google, of how many people asked for directions to a business from its profile.
G
- Google Business Profile
- The free listing a business owns on Google Search and Maps, showing its hours, photos, reviews, phone number and posts.
- Google Business Profile post
- A short update published to a Google Business Profile, shown to people who find the business on Search or Maps.
J
- JobTread
- Job management software for construction and home service businesses, used for estimating, scheduling, budgets and job photos.
L
- Local Services Ads
- Google's pay-per-lead ads for home service trades, shown above the search results with a Google Guaranteed badge.
M
- Missed-call text-back
- An automatic text message sent to anybody whose call you did not answer, usually within seconds, asking what they need.
N
- New Jersey home improvement contractor registration
- The registration New Jersey requires of anybody selling or performing home improvement work, issued by the Division of Consumer Affairs and identified by a number beginning 13VH.
P
- Project story arc
- A sequence of posts that follows one job from demolition to reveal, published over the weeks the work actually takes.
R
- Reputation management software
- Software that asks customers for reviews automatically, collects them in one place, and helps you respond — usually bundled with business texting and web chat.
- Residential specialty contractor
- South Carolina's registration for trades doing specialized work on residential property — plumbing, electrical, HVAC, roofing, painting and the rest — administered by LLR.
S
- Schema markup
- Machine-readable labels added to a web page that state plainly what it is — a business, an article, a question and answer — so search and AI systems do not have to guess.
- ServiceTitan
- Field service management software aimed at larger residential HVAC, plumbing and electrical contractors, with dispatch, marketing attribution and reporting built in.
- Shared lead
- An inquiry a marketplace sells to several contractors at once, so the customer is talking to your competitors before you have called them back.
- Speed to lead
- How long it takes you to respond to a new inquiry, measured from the moment it arrives rather than from the moment you notice it.
- Suffolk County home improvement license
- The license Suffolk County requires of contractors performing home improvement work on Long Island, issued by its Office of Consumer Affairs rather than by New York State.