Working in the depth, or hiding in it
Some work is easy to check. The dirt got moved or it didn’t. The beds were weeded or they weren’t. Anyone can walk out at the end of the day and see it. A lot of the green industry works like that: the job is right there, and so is the proof.
Marketing isn’t like that. Following one person from scrolling past an ad on social media to becoming a customer who stays for years is genuinely hard. They might see the ad, forget it, search weeks later, click on something else, call from a different phone, book in spring and renew for five seasons. Tying that back to what was spent takes real work with the numbers.
That difficulty is real. It’s also where dishonesty finds room.
Where it’s hard to check, it’s easy to hide
Dishonesty tends to settle where honesty is hard to prove. That’s not because complicated fields attract bad people. Most people working in them are trying to do it properly. But when the buyer can’t check the work, an honest provider and a dishonest one can sound exactly the same.
So the useful question isn’t whether a provider says the work is complicated. It often is. Someone doing it properly may well need time to explain it, and some of it won’t fit into a five-minute call.
The question is whether they’re working within the depth of it themselves, or just hiding in the depth of it.
Search is the deep end
Search is where this gets sharpest, because there’s a second layer of uncertainty on top of the first. Google doesn’t publish the full workings of how it ranks results, and it keeps changing them.
That doesn’t make search optimization a dark art, and it doesn’t make it dishonest. Google publishes its own starter guide to it, and describes it as helping search engines understand your content and helping people find your site. What Google prohibits is manipulation: hidden text, keyword stuffing, link schemes, pages built to trick the system rather than help a person. There’s a real line between the two, and plenty of people work on the right side of it.
But uncertainty gives cover to anyone who wants it. “Google changed something” can explain a bad month honestly. It can also explain away a year. Google’s own advice on hiring an SEO is blunt about this: nobody can promise a number one ranking, and anyone claiming a special relationship with Google deserves caution. Its starter guide puts it even more simply. There are no secrets that will automatically rank a site first.
Why it matters in this industry
Here’s the part that bothers me. The people buying this work are often some of the most straightforward people in business. A lawn care owner, a tree service owner, someone running a design/build firm: their whole business runs on work that can be seen. They say what they’ll do, and then it’s either done or it isn’t.
That’s a strength. It also means a lot of them have never had to defend against work that can’t be checked. When someone used to verifiable work hires someone in a field where results are hard to verify, nearly all the information sits on one side of the table. That isn’t a fair position, and there’s nothing foolish about finding yourself in it.
What working in the depth looks like
Honest providers in complicated work tend to leave signs, and none of them takes a statistics degree to see.
- They explain in plain words. Not everything at once, but anything when asked, without the answer turning into fog.
- They tie their work to things the owner already counts: calls, booked estimates, jobs sold, revenue. Not only to rankings, impressions or clicks.
- They show the evidence, including the parts that didn’t work.
- They say what they don’t know. “We can’t tell yet, and here’s when we’ll be able to” is an honest answer. “It’s too complicated to get into,” every time, is a different kind of answer.
- The accounts, the data and the website stay in the owner’s name, so someone else could check the work.
- They say up front what they won’t promise, and why.
None of these proves honesty on its own. But a provider who’s really working in the depth usually has no trouble with any of them, because the depth is where they spend their days. A provider who’s hiding there tends to find each one inconvenient.
The standard we try to hold
That’s the standard we try to run by at Lucrative Landscaping. We run the marketing and sales side for our clients, and the measurement is how we steer that work and how we show it: the calls, the estimates, the jobs, and what was spent to get them. When something isn’t working, the numbers say so, and so do we.
Complexity is real. It just shouldn’t be somewhere to hide.
Chris