Hiring a marketing agency for your tree service, doing it yourself, or hiring in house
What each option really costs a tree company, the red flags in a pitch, fair pricing by service, and why any credible vendor should prove it before you sign.
Tree service owners get pitched constantly. The calls come from directory sites, lead resellers, SEO shops with a stock slide about page one, and agencies who found your listing because it has 17 reviews and no website. Some of them are good. Most of the pitch is indistinguishable from the rest of the pitch.
Here is how to tell the difference, and how to decide whether you should be hiring anyone at all.
Do it yourself first, for 90 days
Almost every tree company should do the free work before paying anyone, because the free work is where most of the return is and because it teaches you what you are buying later.
The 90-day DIY list:
- Fix the Google Business Profile: primary category to Tree Service, secondary Arborist Service, every service written out, ten photos a month, real hours, weekly posts, seeded Q and A. See the profile guide.
- Start asking for a review on every job, at the truck. See the reviews guide.
- Turn on missed-call text-back. An afternoon and under $100 a month.
- Text your past customer list with a seasonal offer.
- Film every crane pick and post it.
That is worth more than the first $3,000 an agency will spend on your behalf, and it costs you time rather than money. Owners who skip it and buy ads instead are paying to send traffic at a profile that is not ready. 25.5% of tree companies have no website at all, and buying clicks before fixing that is the most expensive sequencing error in the trade.
What each option costs
Doing it yourself. Free in dollars, roughly five to eight hours a week in owner time. Realistically that time comes out of estimates, which is the actual cost. Works well for profile, reviews and follow-up. Works badly for Google Ads, where the learning curve costs more in wasted spend than a manager would have charged.
Hiring in house. A competent marketing coordinator is $45,000 to $70,000 plus tools. Only sensible above roughly $2,000,000 in revenue or five crews. Below that you are paying full time for a part-time amount of work and you have nobody to check their judgment.
An agency or freelancer. Fair market ranges for a local service company:
- Google Ads management: $500 to $1,500 a month, or 10% to 15% of ad spend, plus the spend itself.
- Meta ads management: $400 to $1,200 a month plus spend.
- Local SEO and profile management: $500 to $1,500 a month.
- Website build: $2,000 to $6,000 once, or $150 to $400 a month managed.
- Review generation and missed-call systems: $200 to $500 a month.
- Full service across several channels: $1,500 to $4,000 a month for a company your size.
If a quote sits far above those ranges, ask precisely what is different. Sometimes there is a real answer. Often the answer is a long contract and a junior account manager.
Red flags
A 12-month contract before any work has been done. The standard justification is that SEO takes time. SEO does take time. That is an argument for a 90-day out clause, not for locking a tree company into a year on faith.
Guaranteed rankings or guaranteed lead counts. Nobody controls Google's ranking and nobody can promise a number of calls. A guarantee is either meaningless in the fine print or it is going to be met with junk leads.
They own the accounts. If the Google Ads account, the Meta pixel, the website domain or the phone tracking numbers are in the agency's name, leaving costs you your entire history. Everything must be built in accounts you own, with you as administrator, from day one. This is the single most important question to ask and the one owners forget.
Shared or resold leads. Some vendors sell the same tree removal lead to four companies. You are then in a five-minute race with three competitors on a lead you paid for. Ask directly: is this lead exclusive to me.
No call recording and no lead-level reporting. If the report shows impressions and clicks but not calls, estimates and booked jobs, they are reporting their activity rather than your revenue. Demand call recordings.
They will not talk about your close rate. A vendor who is only interested in delivering leads and not in whether you converted them is not going to make you money for long. The missed calls guide covers the part of this that is yours to fix.
No tree service experience and no willingness to learn it. They should know without being told that removal and pruning need separate campaigns, that storm work spikes, and that ISA certification and insurance are the trust signals in your trade. If you have to explain your business twice, they are learning on your money.
The questions to ask on the call
- Whose name are the accounts in, and what happens to them if I leave?
- What is the shortest commitment you offer?
- Show me a report from a current tree, roofing or landscaping client with the name removed.
- What do you need from me every week, and how long does it take?
- Which of these do you do in house and which do you subcontract?
- What would you do first for my company, and why that one?
That last question is the useful one. A vendor who answers "run Google Ads" without having looked at your profile, your review count or whether you have a website is selling the thing they sell rather than the thing you need.
Why trial first is the fair structure
An owner should be able to see a channel working before paying for it. That is the whole reason this site offers every service as a free 14-day trial: setup and management at no cost for two weeks, built in your own accounts, no card on file, and at the end you keep it at a quoted price, switch, or stop.
Two honest limits on it. Fourteen days is enough to judge paid channels, missed-call systems, review processes and a website build. It is not long enough to judge SEO or AI search visibility, which move over months, so what you are judging there is the quality of the work rather than the result. And ad spend paid to Google or Meta is yours, because that money goes to the platform, not to us.
The point of a trial is not the two free weeks. It is that a vendor willing to work before being paid has to be confident in the work, and a vendor who insists on a signature first is asking you to carry all the risk.
Frequently asked
Can I use a lead reseller instead? It is a legitimate channel and it is a rental. You get calls with no asset accumulating, at a price that rises, on leads often shared with competitors. Use it to fill a gap while you build your own, not as your strategy.
What if I have no time for any of this? Then buy the two things with the shortest path to revenue first: missed-call follow-up and Google Ads on removal terms. Leave SEO and social until you have someone answering the phone.
How do I know if the agency is actually doing the work? Log into your own accounts. Change history in Google Ads shows every edit and when it happened. Ten minutes a month tells you more than any report.
If you want to try any single service for two weeks with nothing on the line, that is the free 14-day trial. Text or call (385) 832-6175, or read the FAQ first.