Contractor Marketing Services in Chicagoland
You’re Paying Four Vendors
and Still Losing Jobs
to the Same Competitor
Lemur Marketing runs the entire marketing stack for residential contractors across Chicagoland. Website, Google Business Profile, local SEO, Google Ads, and Local Service Ads, built as one system by one team.
Four Vendors Doing Four Jobs
Is Not a Strategy
Most contractors end up with a web guy, an SEO guy, an ads guy, and a nephew who posts on Facebook. Each one optimizes their own slice. Nobody owns whether the phone rings.
Your ads and your website work against each other
Your ads vendor buys the click. Your web vendor built a page that was never designed to convert it. You pay for that traffic twice: once to Google, and again in the estimate you never got to give.
One team builds both →Nobody owns the number that matters
Your SEO vendor reports rankings. Your ads vendor reports impressions and clicks. Neither one reports booked estimates, so when revenue is flat there is no one to hold accountable.
We report on calls and booked jobs →Your Google Business Profile sits untouched
Your profile is the first thing a homeowner sees, and it is the single biggest driver of map pack rankings. Most contractors set it up once, then never post, never add photos, and never answer a question.
We manage your GBP monthly →You look like every other contractor
A generic company name and a generic website put you into a price comparison you cannot win. A homeowner spending $75,000 on an outdoor living project is not shopping for the cheapest generalist.
We build you a specialist brand →The Full Stack,
Run by One Team
Every channel below feeds the others. Skip one and the rest carry the load badly. This is the whole picture, quoted as one engagement instead of five invoices.
A custom site built to convert homeowners who are already comparing three contractors. Fast, mobile-first, and structured so search engines can read what you actually do.
Website design →Full profile setup and active monthly management: services, photos, posts, and Q&A. This is what a homeowner sees before they ever reach your website.
GBP management →On-page work, citations, consistent NAP data, and a dedicated page for every suburb you serve. The unglamorous work that decides who ranks in the map pack.
Local SEO →Paid search above the map pack for the terms homeowners use when they are ready to hire. Tight geo-targeting so you are not paying for clicks 40 miles outside your service area.
Google Ads →Local Service Ads sit at the very top of the results page and charge per lead instead of per click. We handle Google’s license, insurance, and background check verification to get you approved.
Pay per lead →Amplifies your map listing into the suburbs where you have not earned an organic ranking yet. It fills the gap while local SEO does the slower, more permanent work.
Profile setup across the accounts that matter, plus the posting cadence that keeps your brand consistent everywhere a homeowner might check you before calling.
Social media →Press releases, citations, and structured mentions so that ChatGPT and AI search results recognize your company. If the model has never heard of you, you do not get recommended.
Brand mentions & AI →Coaching on the jobsite photos and video that actually perform, then retargeting ads built from whichever pieces earned the most organic attention.
Real Reviews,
Real Results
Chicagoland businesses who switched from lead-gen platforms and generic agencies.
Two Calls Before
You Spend a Dollar
There are no fixed packages and no proposal until we have looked at your actual numbers. Pricing follows the audit, not the other way around.
Twenty minutes. We find out what you build, what you charge, where your leads come from now, and whether we are a fit at all. If we are not, we will say so.
We pull your current rankings, your Google Business Profile, your site, and your closest competitors, then show you exactly where you are losing to them.
A written plan with the channels in priority order, what each one is expected to do, and what it costs. Engagements run $750 to $2,500 per month plus ad spend.
If your brand reads as a generalist, we fix that before we spend on ads. Positioning changes what you can charge, and it changes it faster than any channel.
Site and Google Business Profile get built correctly first. Sending paid traffic to a site that leaks trust is the most expensive mistake in contractor marketing.
Calls and booked estimates, by channel. Not impressions. You get one person to call when something is not working, not a support queue.
We Learned Specialization
the Hard Way
The same crew under a specialist brand quotes higher and closes more, before anything else changes.
See Deck Builder MarketingLemur Marketing exists because of one experiment that failed and one that worked.
Ryan Leonard went all in on the agency in Des Plaines in May 2021, after twenty years in technical engineering, including threat assessments for the Department of Homeland Security, eight years with ADP installing dealership systems nationwide, and five years in cybersecurity testing the defenses of billion-dollar companies. He had come to marketing out of necessity: the security firm he worked for was great at the work and invisible online, so he started studying SEO to fix it, found that Google is a network with rules like any other, and spent two years learning them.
He pointed the new agency at the trade he grew up in. From twelve years old he built decks and cabinetry in his brother’s business, and he later certified as an auto body and paint technician, two crafts with the same satisfaction: taking nothing and turning it into something. But when he marketed to deck builders as “Lemur Marketing,” a general agency with a general name, it fell flat. When he launched Deck Builder Marketing and led with the specialty, trust came first and the clients followed.
That is the whole method now. A homeowner spending real money on a deck does not hire the generalist. Lemur helps contractors become the specialist, sometimes with a new brand: Sean Moser in Springfield, Illinois, went from Hammer Time Handyman to a dedicated deck-building company with the same skills and a very different phone.
We Only Work With
Want, Not Need
Nobody needs a $75,000 deck. They want it. Our job is to make them want yours
We build for contractors whose customers are choosing to spend, not forced to. Decks, patios, outdoor kitchens, pergolas, porches, screen rooms and sunrooms. Kitchen remodels, basement finishes, in-law additions and ADA units.
That distinction matters because aspirational work is won on trust and brand, which is exactly what marketing can move. Emergency work is won on whoever answers first, which is a different business entirely.
We do not take roofers, and we do not take a second contractor in the same trade in the same territory. Your competitors are not our clients.
Not sure which side of that line you fall on? That is what the intro call is for. Read how we got here →
48 Suburbs
Across Chicagoland
We work within 25 miles of Des Plaines. Pick your city to see how contractor marketing works in that specific market.
Who We Run
The Full Stack For
The stack is the same for every contractor. What changes is the timing, the emphasis and the searches worth chasing. Pick your trade, or see all twelve trades we market.
It Really Takes
There is no single timeline, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. Profile, tracking and site fixes move inside the first 30 days. Rankings and leads follow on a clock set by your competitors, the demand in your suburbs, and how long you have been in business.
Our guide lays out what moves first and what moves later, the four variables that decide the gap, why Google's own four-months-to-a-year figure is a reference point and not a promise, and what to measure instead of a ranking position.
Read: How Long Contractor SEO Takes, and What Decides It →Find Out What
You’re Missing
Book the intro call. We will pull your rankings, your Google Business Profile, and your closest competitors, then show you exactly where the jobs are going instead.