Rental and equipment searches
“Excavator near me” is mostly people who want to rent a mini-ex for the weekend. Equipment dealers and Sunbelt bid on those terms and so will you, unless they are blocked.
Equipment costs money whether it moves or not. Keep it moving.
An idle excavator costs you money every hour. Google is full of people who need one on site: builders prepping lots, homeowners with a failed septic, farmers cutting a pond. It is also full of people looking for excavator rentals, operator jobs and dirt bike tracks.
We build campaigns by job type, keep the rental and equipment searches out, bid harder in the counties where your iron already sits, and track every call to a quoted, invoiced job.
Jobs from $2k to $100k+, site packages higher. The upside is real. So is the waste, and here’s where it usually comes from.
“Excavator near me” is mostly people who want to rent a mini-ex for the weekend. Equipment dealers and Sunbelt bid on those terms and so will you, unless they are blocked.
A lead 50 miles away is a half-day of hauling before a bucket touches dirt. Ads that are not geo-weighted send you jobs that are not worth the trailer trip.
Rock, water, bad surveys, a GC who is three weeks behind. Site work margin disappears into delays and sub payouts. The marketing line is one place you can stop the bleeding.
Campaigns by job: Residential site prep and foundations, septic and drain field, utility trenching, land clearing, demolition, pond and driveway work, commercial site packages. Each with bids that match the ticket.Bid by distance from the yard: Heavier in the counties where your equipment already sits. Lighter or off where the mobilization kills the margin.Negatives for everything that is not a job: Rental, “for sale”, operator jobs, CDL, training, Caterpillar, Kubota, “how to dig”. Cleaned weekly.Quotes tracked to invoices: Call tracking with recordings, plus your job software (Jobber, Buildertrend, HCSS or QuickBooks) so Google learns from invoiced site work.Examples from excavation accounts. The real lists run to hundreds of terms and get reviewed every week.
Your account is run by two PPC pros with 20+ years each. No handoff to a coordinator juggling 35 accounts.
Not quarterly. Not “when the algorithm settles”. Every week, by hand, so the junk never gets a chance to pile up.
Your Google Ads account, your data, your tracking, from day one. Leave anytime and take it all with you.
Who likes 12-month contracts? We don’t. We earn the next quarter by making the last one pay.
Most contractors do well at $2.5k to $6k a month. Clicks run $8 to $25, and one septic or site prep job pays for a month. Rural markets need less; metro markets with lots of builders need more.
No. One excavation contractor per metro. We will not send the same site prep lead to two sets of trucks.
Yes. Builders and GCs search differently (“site work contractor”, “excavation subcontractor”), so they get their own campaign and a page built for a superintendent, with a bid request instead of a homeowner form.
Engineered walls at $20k to $100k. Garden walls at $1,500. Same search, different day.
How we run it →House demos at $15k to $40k. Pool removals at $8k. Junk haulers bid on half your words.
How we run it →Water in the basement, a lot that will not pass. People search when it rains.
How we run it →The homeowner has a Pinterest board and a budget. Beat the big-box stores to the click.
How we run it →Talk to a senior PPC expert who has run excavation accounts. Never a junior.