Hiring a marketing agency for a garage door company

Four weeks ago the FTC and the state of Illinois took Premium Home Service to court. The complaint alleges that since at least 2018 the company created thousands of business profiles for home repair companies that did not exist, built around searches such as “garage door repair”, and routed the calls to representatives elsewhere, including in the Philippines. In many cases, the complaint says, nobody turned up at the house. In others the technician who did was not licensed or qualified.

If you own a garage door company, little of that is news. What the case should change is how you judge the agencies pitching you this summer. An agency that does not know why your category is treated differently will run your account like any other service business, and in this trade that ends with ads that never get approved or a profile that gets suspended.

Here are the questions we would want a garage door owner to put to any agency, including us.

Does the agency know your ads need a video interview?

Google restricts garage door repair ads until the business passes Advanced Verification. The process reviews your ads account and public records such as state registrations and professional licenses, and it includes a video interview that Google records. Local Services Ads ask for the same, on top of background checks on the business, the owner and the technicians, liability insurance and state-level licenses where local law calls for them.

Two details separate an agency that has been through this from one that has only read about it:

• Garage door services get no pre-badge ads in Local Services, so no paid lead arrives from that channel until every check has cleared. Google’s help pages put the average at three to four weeks after documents go in.
• Google may ask a verified company to re-verify every 12 months, and again after moving locations or changing websites. An agency keen to relaunch your site while a review is pending is creating a problem for both of you.

Ask what the agency will do with the weeks before approval. A good answer involves your profile, reviews and site, not a pause.

Will it write “24/7” in your headline?

Plenty of agencies will, because it works in other trades. In this one, Connecticut’s Department of Consumer Protection told homeowners last year to be skeptical of any garage door company that promises immediate service or says it operates 24/7, and added that most legitimate companies do not. Google’s Advanced Verification policies say something similar in their own terms: claims of rapid response times that cannot be guaranteed do not belong in text ads or on landing pages.

The same policies keep service call fees and starting prices out of text ads entirely, and coupons out of ads that promote repair or emergency work. Prices shown on your site must include every fee, with a typical range for work that varies. If the sample ads in a proposal lead with a service call fee or a repair discount, the agency has not read the rules your account will be judged by.

How will it make your profile look real?

The fake profiles in the FTC’s complaint used local addresses that belonged to unrelated third parties or were made up. Google’s own guidelines say a virtual office is not eligible for a profile and that a service-area business should hide its address. The name on the profile should be the one on your storefront, website and stationery, not a run of search keywords.

Connecticut’s advice to homeowners doubles as a checklist for your site. It tells them to confirm that a company’s registration matches the contact details on its website, to distrust a site with few photos or buried contact information, and to treat a request for cash or a payment app as a possible scam. An agency worth hiring will ask for photos of your trucks, crew and shop, your registration or license number, and the legal name you will be verified under, before it writes any copy.

What is its plan for reviews?

BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer survey found that 47% of people will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews, and that 74% care only about reviews from the last three months. That is hard on honest companies competing with profiles padded by fabricated five-star ratings, which is what the FTC alleges here, charged in part under the Reviews and Testimonials Rule it finalized in August 2024.

The answer you want is dull: a request to every customer after every job, an owner reply to every review, and nothing bought, filtered or written by staff. Google’s verification policies separately forbid tampering with your own reviews or a competitor’s. Anyone offering a faster route is offering the conduct the FTC has just sued over.

What the first ninety days should look like

A plan built for this trade runs in roughly this order:

• Weeks 1 to 2: both verification applications filed, and a profile audit covering the name, the address or hidden service area, categories and photos.
• Weeks 2 to 6: the site and profile rebuilt around proof of who you are, with your own vans, uniforms and shop, the registration number and price ranges that include fees. Review requests start after every job.
• Weeks 3 to 8: call tracking and recording, with repair calls, opener jobs, new doors and commercial work tagged separately so a spring repair and a new door never share one average.
• Weeks 6 to 12: search ads live the week verification clears, Local Services once the badge is through, and the first reminders to past customers about the yearly technician visit recommended by DASMA, the garage door manufacturers’ association.

What a monthly report should show

One page, in plain numbers:

• Calls by source, answered and missed.
• Booked repairs and new-door quotes, counted apart.
• Cost per booked job by channel. For context, LocaliQ’s 2025 home services report put the median Google search lead across its 16 home service categories at $90.92, from campaigns running April 2024 to March 2025. That is a market median, not a target.
• Reviews added in the month, and the date of the newest one.
• Verification status, plus any lookalike or fake listings reported to Google.

What to do this month

• Search “garage door repair” and “garage door spring repair” on a phone in your three biggest towns, and note every listing you cannot match to a real company.
• Check that your profile, website and state registration all show the same legal name and contact details.
• Find your Local Services and Google Ads verification status, and the date you were last verified.
• Read every ad and the top of your homepage, and strike any “24/7”, “immediate” or response-time promise you cannot keep every single time.
• Collect twenty photos of your own trucks, crew and finished doors before any agency asks for them.

How we approach this trade, from verification to the winter spring rush, is set out on our garage door marketing page. If the ads are the part you want looked at first, read how we run Google Ads and Local Services Ads, or begin with your Business Profile.