Spend the first two weeks on the free things, then commit the money to one channel rather than splitting it. Which channel depends on a single question: can the business wait a season for work, or does it need calls this month. That answer decides the whole ninety days.
This is a sequencing article rather than a comparison. If you want the economics of each side, we wrote that separately. This is about what to do in which order when you have a budget for the first time and nothing is set up.
Weeks one and two: the free work
Nothing gets bought yet. Claim and complete the Google Business Profile, set the primary category, list the services individually, fill the description, set the hours including holidays, add photos of real work. Connect Search Console. Get one review link saved on the phone of whoever finishes jobs.
This takes two afternoons and it routinely moves the map results on its own. Spending money before doing it is buying traffic into a leaky system, and we have watched businesses spend a thousand dollars a month for a year with an incomplete profile sitting there the entire time.
Week three: decide which question you are answering
Two honest questions. How many weeks of work is currently booked, and what is a customer worth over the time you keep them.
If you have under three weeks booked, you need calls and the money goes into advertising. If you have a comfortable pipeline and you are building for next year, the money goes into the website and content. There is no clever third answer, and the businesses that try to do both on a small budget learn nothing from either.
Want the ninety days mapped to your business?
Tell us how many weeks of work you have booked and what a customer is worth. That is enough for us to tell you which route to take.
Get a free website and marketing auditIf the answer is advertising: days 21 to 90
One campaign, two or three services with the best margin, the towns where the drive makes money, and each ad pointing at the page about that specific service. Read the search terms report weekly and add negatives. Answer the phone.
By day 60 you should be able to say what a booked job costs you in advertising. That number is the most valuable thing the first quarter produces, because it decides everything afterwards: whether to spend more, whether to raise prices, whether the service you thought was the priority actually is.
| Days | If you need work now | If you can wait a season |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 14 | Profile, reviews, Search Console | Profile, reviews, Search Console |
| 15 to 30 | One campaign, best margin services only | Write the top service pages properly |
| 31 to 60 | Weekly search terms, cut what wastes | One content piece, reviews running |
| 61 to 90 | Know your cost per booked job | First movement, second content piece |
If the answer is search: days 21 to 90
A real page for each of your top services, written properly, with the numbers in. One content piece a month answering a question customers actually ask. Reviews going out continuously. Nothing dramatic and nothing you can see moving before about day 60.
The discipline here is not to give up in week six. Search work looks like nothing is happening for longer than anyone finds comfortable, and businesses that were not warned about that cancel just before it starts to work.
Day 90: what you should be able to answer
How many people contacted the business this month and where they came from. Which service produced the most contacts. What it cost to get one. Whether the answer changes what you sell.
If you cannot answer those after ninety days, the problem is measurement rather than channel, and the next ninety days should start by fixing that before spending anything more.
What if the answer changes at day forty five?
Then change it. The plan is a sequence rather than a contract with yourself, and a business whose pipeline fills up in week five should stop buying inquiries it cannot service.
The thing not to do is oscillate. Switching channels every three weeks because neither has produced yet is the most common way a first budget gets wasted, and it usually happens around week four when advertising has produced a couple of expensive leads and search has produced nothing visible. Both of those are exactly what week four looks like. Decide on evidence at day sixty, not on nerves at day twenty five.
When we would say do neither yet
When there is no website worth sending anyone to, when nobody answers the phone reliably, or when the business cannot take more work. In all three cases the marketing budget is better spent elsewhere, and we say so several times a year even though it costs us the engagement.
The most common version is capacity. A business with two crews running flat out does not need more inquiries, it needs a third crew or higher prices, and marketing spend at that moment mostly buys inquiries you have to turn down. That is a worse outcome than doing nothing, because turning people away leaves an impression too.
What each route involves is on the digital marketing page, how the pieces fit together is on the Growth Engine page, and the plans that carry either sequence are on the pricing page.