Installs and repair calls are two businesses on one truck. How to pick an agency that splits them, beats the manufacturer's dealer locator, and sells the service plan.
Why a generalist agency is the wrong fit for a generator dealer
A standby generator company runs two businesses that happen to share a truck. One is a consultative, high-ticket install sale: a site visit, a load calculation, a natural-gas-or-propane decision, permits, and a timeline that stretches over weeks. The other is an urgent repair call on a unit that is already installed, usually discovered mid-outage when a blinking amber light means no power and no patience. A generalist builds one campaign and one landing page for both, and both convert badly.
The second miss is the manufacturer. Most dealers are factory-authorized Generac or Kohler dealers, and Generac's PowerPro tiers are a searched-for trust signal. But homeowners often search the brand, not your company, and land on the manufacturer's own dealer locator. Your site, your map ranking, and your AI visibility have to beat that built-in placement, not just the other dealers in town. An agency that does not know the locator exists will report leads that were never yours to lose.
Third is the calendar. A storm watch compresses both demand curves into one week, then everything goes quiet for months. Marketing that only works during a hurricane or an ice storm leaves your crews idle the rest of the year.
The first question: how do you split installs from repairs?
Ask it exactly like that. A shop that knows this trade will describe two campaign groups, two landing pages, and two conversion actions, with a one-tap repair request on one side and a quote request with financing on the other. They will also know the searches: “generator installation near me” and “whole house generator cost” on one side, “generator repair near me,” “generator won't start,” and “generac generator error light” on the other.
The second half of the question is the maintenance plan. Generac units run a weekly self-exercise cycle, and annual or twice-yearly service, oil, plug, battery, and a load-bank test, is the steadiest revenue in the business and the easiest to under-sell once the install truck leaves. Ask how the agency would turn an install customer into a service-plan customer. If the answer is silence, they think of you as a one-job trade.
Also ask whether they have run Google Local Services Ads for a licensed electrical trade. Many dealers qualify through their electrical license, and it is a different setup from regular search ads.
Which channels book installs and repairs, in order
Local search comes first, because the repair call is a map-pack decision made in a hurry. Category, hours, service area, and fresh reviews on your Google Business Profile decide it. City pages for each area your crews cover matter too, since the searcher types the town name more often than yours.
Google Ads and Local Services Ads come second. They can put repair calls and quote requests in front of you within weeks, and they are the only channel that can flex up when a storm is in the forecast. Split the budgets. Repair keywords should never starve because an install campaign is spending.
AI search is third and growing. Homeowners ask ChatGPT or Gemini “my generator won't start during a power outage, who can fix it fast” and “recommend an authorized Generac dealer in [city].” Pages that explain error codes, service plans, and your dealer tier in plain words are what get you named. Details at /seo/geo-ai-search.
Email and text follow-up close the install sale, which families sit on for weeks, and they sell the maintenance plan. Storm-season reminders sent before the forecast turns fill the service calendar in the quiet months. Reviews after every install and every repair are what beat the national dealer-locator listings on trust.
Storm seasons and the cost-per-job question
Demand follows outages. On the Atlantic and Gulf coasts that means hurricane season through the summer and fall. In the north, and across much of Canada, it is ice storms and winter wind. In the West, it is wildfire-related shutoffs. After each event, “generator won't start” and “whole house generator cost” spike together, then fade. A good agency builds authority and reviews in the quiet months so you rank when the spike comes, and it plans ad budget to rise with the forecast instead of running flat.
A whole-home standby install is one of the biggest tickets in home services. A repair is a smaller job but comes with the referral, the service plan, and the next unit. So ask for cost per booked install and cost per booked repair as two numbers, plus service-plan sign-ups as a third. An agency that reports one blended cost per lead is hiding which side of the business is paying.
Insist on call tracking with recording. Storm-week calls get missed, and a missed-call text-back recovers jobs your office never knew it lost.
Red flags and what you must own
Your Google Business Profile, your Local Services Ads profile, your ad account, your website, your domain, your call tracking numbers, and your customer list must be yours, with the agency added as a manager. Some vendors run ads from their own account and keep the history when you leave; that history is what makes your campaigns cheaper over time, so losing it is expensive.
Red flags: a single funnel for installs and repairs; no mention of the manufacturer's locator; reporting that counts locator leads as agency leads; guarantees of job counts; and a contract longer than a storm season. Be careful with review tactics too. Google's rules bar offering anything in exchange for a review.
Ask what keeps running if you stop: the city pages, the repair request flow, the storm reminders, the maintenance-plan emails. All of it should stay with you.
Six questions to ask a generator marketing agency
One: “How do you split install and repair campaigns, landing pages, and reporting?” Two: “How will we outrank the manufacturer's dealer locator for our own area?” Three: “Which of the profile, ad accounts, site, and phone numbers will be in our name?” Four: “How do you plan budget around storm season and the quiet months?” Five: “How do you turn an install customer into a service-plan customer?” Six: “What leaves with us at the end of the term?”
Listen for the words “load-bank test” and “dealer locator.” A shop that says them without prompting has done this before.
As one public benchmark, SearchPod posts its prices at /pricing rather than quoting them: Google Ads run at 10% of budget with a $600 a month floor and no markup, $50 per SEO page with a 10-page minimum, and websites as one-time packages from $1,500 up. Setup is $0, terms are month to month, the first 30 days are guaranteed, and a free proposal arrives within one business day via /get-proposal. For a generator dealer that means both demand curves tracked separately, and service-plan reminders built in.
