When the marketing is working the phone rings more. The catch is that more calls is not the same as more jobs. Some of those callers want a freebie, some are miles outside your area, and some are collecting quotes they will never book. You cannot stop all of them, but you can stop paying to attract them.
Put the price range and the area on the page
A lot of junk calls happen because the page tells people nothing, so everyone rings to ask. If your landing page shows a rough price and the postcodes you cover, two things happen. The people who were only ever going to haggle move on, and the people outside your patch do not call at all. That is a good thing, not a lost lead.
Ask for a date, not just a number
A form that asks when they need the job done quietly sorts the browsers from the buyers. Someone who picks a date has half committed. Someone who will not is usually still shopping around, and now you know that before you have spent twenty minutes on the phone with them.
Track the calls so you can see the pattern
Call tracking records which ad and which search each call came from. After a few weeks a pattern appears: certain keywords bring booked jobs, others bring time-wasters. Once you can see it in black and white, you move the money towards the searches that pay and away from the ones that do not.
You will not stop every junk call
There will always be the odd person after a free sofa run. But you can stop building your marketing so that it invites them, and you can get your mornings back for the jobs that are actually worth quoting.
