What to ask an agency before it runs your lawn care season

The mowers are winterized, the trailers are parked and the phone is quiet, which is exactly why January is when lawn care owners get pitched. It is also when the season gets decided. Customers are choosing whether to renew last year’s agreement or switch, design clients are booking site visits for spring, and if your crews depend on H-2B workers, the filing window for April 1 starts opened on New Year’s Day, so you already have a rough idea of how many crews you will field.

That crew count should shape any plan you sign, and an agency that never asks about it is planning someone else’s season. Here are the questions we would want a lawn care or landscaping owner to put to any agency, including us.

Which Local Services category would they file you under?

Google runs Local Services Ads in two categories that sound alike and bring different calls. Lawn care services covers maintaining lawns, which Google spells out as weed control, mowing and seeding, along with installation. Landscaping services covers companies that design, install and maintain gardens. Since October 2025 both carry the single Google Verified badge that replaced the older badges.

The choice decides which searches you show up for. Lawn care is the category built around mowing, so a design-build firm filed there should expect mowing calls it never wanted, while a mowing company filed under Landscaping is competing for patio and planting work it may not do.

Then ask about timing. Google checks general and professional liability insurance, any state license your work requires and a verified Business Profile, and runs business and owner checks for some advertisers. It puts average screening at three to four weeks after the documents are in. An application filed this month is live before the first spring cleanups; one filed in March goes live while the crews are already buried. An agency that does not raise this in the first meeting has probably never been through it.

How will they tell a mowing lead from a patio lead?

Lawn and landscaping companies sell two products. One is recurring maintenance, cheap per visit and valuable over a season. The other is design and installation, a large job decided over weeks of quotes. A plan that treats them as one campaign will report a blended cost per lead that describes neither.

LocaliQ’s 2025 home services benchmarks, drawn from 3,211 search campaigns that ran from April 2024 to March 2025, show why this matters for paid search in particular:

• The median cost per lead for Landscaping was $117.92, against $90.92 across all 16 home service categories.
• Landscaping’s click-through rate, 4.69%, was the lowest of the 16.
• Its median conversion rate was 6.42%, below the 7.33% for home services overall.

Our reading of that low click rate is that a lot of landscaping searches come from people looking for ideas, plants or weekend projects rather than someone to hire. So ask:

• “Which searches will you bid on, and which will you exclude?” A good answer names installation and design terms, and a long negative list for do-it-yourself, plant and job searches.
• “How will you count a lead that turns into a season agreement?” If the answer is a cost per lead and nothing after it, the reports will never show what a mowing customer is worth.
• “Will the report separate maintenance, cleanups and design-build?” They close on different clocks and pay back on different scales.

What will they put in an irrigation or weed control ad?

Lawn companies add services to raise the ticket, and those services carry licenses that reach into the ad copy. An agency writing for you has to know them before it writes a word.

• Texas irrigation. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality tells homeowners, in a leaflet written for them, to ignore any irrigation ad that does not include the irrigator’s license number, which looks something like LI0123456. Licensed irrigators must also display the number on their vehicles, and bids, invoices and warranties should carry it.
• Texas weed control. The Texas Department of Agriculture requires a license to apply any pesticide, general-use products included, to lawns for hire. Applicators who spread only fertilizer need no TDA license, which changes what a “weed and feed” offer can promise.
• Florida fertilizer. Since January 1, 2014, anyone applying commercial fertilizer to urban landscapes has needed a state certification, which runs four years before it has to be renewed.
• California installation. Since January 1, 2025 the minor work exemption covers jobs up to $1,000, and only when no permit is needed and nobody is employed on the job. An unlicensed operator may advertise that work only with a statement in the ad that it is not licensed.

The question to ask is simple: “Where will my license numbers appear?” The right answer covers ads, the website, the Business Profile, the trucks and the paperwork, state by state.

What the first ninety days should look like before April

The order matters because the season starts whether the marketing is ready or not. A plan we would sign off on for a maintenance company looks like this:

• Weeks 1 to 2: tracking. Every call and form tagged by source, plus a field in your scheduling software marking each new customer as a season agreement, a one-off job or a design project.
• Weeks 2 to 5: the profile and the application. Business Profile categories, service areas drawn around the streets you want denser, every service listed, photos of your own crews. The Local Services application filed in the right category.
• Weeks 4 to 8: pages and paid search. A page each for mowing, aeration and seeding, cleanups and installation, and search campaigns aimed only at installation and design work.
• Weeks 6 to 12: last year’s customers. Renewal reminders, a review request to everyone you served last fall, and the crabgrass preemergence offer, which Penn State Extension says has to go down before weed seed germinates in early to mid-spring.

Spend that starts before the tracking does leaves you guessing in October which channel actually built your routes.

What to do this month

• Settle how many crews you can field on April 1 before you agree to any spring budget.
• Pick your Local Services category based on the work you want more of, and file the application before the month is out.
• Pull last season’s ads, flyers, site and truck lettering, and check each against your state’s license rules for irrigation, weed control and fertilizer.
• Ask every customer from last fall’s cleanups and aeration for a review now, so the profile does not open spring with five-month-old feedback.
• Ask each agency you meet for a sample report that shows season agreements signed, not only leads.

A good agency will answer all of this in plain terms, and will ask about your crews, your routes and your license numbers before it talks about ads. If you want to see how we would plan your year, our page for landscaping and lawn care companies lays out the order we work in, and our Google Ads and Local Services work shows how the paid side runs next to your profile.