THE SHORT ANSWER
For window and door companies, local SEO carries no media cost per enquiry, but takes three to nine months of work before the first one arrives, and it still takes 4 to 6 enquiries to sign one customer. The best long-term investment a windows and doors business can make, and useless as a way to fill next month.
A channel that is a bargain for one trade is a money pit for the next one along, and the difference is arithmetic rather than opinion. This page runs local SEO specifically for window and door companies: the modelled cost, the volume ceiling, the skill it demands, and a plain verdict at the end.
The relevant economics for this trade: a typical project is worth EUR 5,000 to EUR 12,000, the buyer is a homeowner replacing single or early double glazing, demand peaks late winter and spring and bottoms out in August, and it takes 4 to 6 genuine enquiries to sign one customer.
The numbers, at a glance
Cost per enquiry once established: effectively zero in media spend, against an ongoing cost of review chasing and page maintenance
What replaces the media budget: roughly two hours a week for the first six months, spent on review collection, photographs and service-area pages, then a smaller permanent habit
Time to first enquiry: three to nine months from a standing start
Verdict for window and door companies: The best long-term investment a windows and doors business can make, and useless as a way to fill next month.
How local SEO behaves in this trade
Local SEO and the map pack produces enquiries whose intent is as high as paid search, and the click is free. Once it works it is the cheapest enquiry source that exists, and it compounds rather than stopping the day you stop paying.
The constraint nobody mentions in the sales pitch: a verified address in the service area, which excludes anyone running a genuinely virtual operation. For a windows and doors business working a single metro, that is the thing to check before anything else.
Against that, the cost of being wrong. It is slow, it is hostage to review velocity and proximity, and none of it puts a job in the diary this week. Skill required: Moderate but relentless. Reviews, service-area pages and photographs, forever.
The two-appointment structure this trade cannot avoid
Selling appointment first, technical survey second, manufacture only after the survey. Compressing the two produces remeasures, delays and credit notes. Households tolerate the structure well when it is explained on the first call and react badly when it appears as a surprise after a deposit has been paid. Lead time from deposit to fitting typically runs six to ten weeks, and stating that number early removes most of the chasing calls later.
Generating enquiries yourself or buying them
Both work, and the break-even is arithmetic rather than ideology. Running your own campaigns starts to beat a per-enquiry price once monthly media spend is high enough for the fixed costs of a page, tracking and account management to spread thinly across the volume.
Below that point, buying exclusive enquiries is usually the better arithmetic and it flexes with your capacity rather than committing you to a retainer. The supplier carries the auction risk, you carry the follow-up, and for a windows and doors business with an unpredictable diary that division is often the correct one.
Profile categories, service area and review motion for a window and door business
Primary category window installation service, with door supplier as a secondary and conservatory contractor only where you deliver it. Separate the services list by material and product: uPVC, aluminium, timber, composite doors, bifolds and sash, because material is how households search in this trade.
Service area: as narrow as your fitting teams genuinely travel. Fitting days are the constraint in this business and long journeys eat the margin on a per-frame price
When to ask for the review: on the final day at the making-good stage, in person, with the customer standing in the finished room. This is the one trade where asking on site materially outperforms asking by message
What to prompt the review to mention: the number of frames, the material and colour chosen, and how the property was left at the end of each day
Photographs: front elevations before and after from the same position. In this trade the profile photo set effectively is the sales brochure
Service and suburb pages work right up to the point they become doorways
A page per service and a page per meaningful area works when each one carries something that could only be written about that combination: a completed job, a photograph, a local constraint, a price reflecting local conditions. The same page with the place name swapped is the exact pattern search engines penalise. Ten genuine pages outperform eighty templated ones and take roughly the same total effort to produce.
What it actually costs, since it is not free
Local SEO has no cost per enquiry, which makes it look free and makes it easy to under-resource. The real cost is time and it is paid up front against a return that arrives months later.
Months 1 to 2: claim and complete the business profile, add real photographs of windows and doors work on local properties, and build one page per service and one per major suburb.
Months 2 to 6: collect reviews on every completed job, ideally naming the suburb and the specific work. Recency matters more than total count.
Months 3 to 9: the first sign of traction, which in this trade looks like enquiries referencing photographs on the profile rather than the website, since this is the trade where the image set does the selling.
Month 9 onward: steady enquiry flow at effectively zero marginal cost, which is the only acquisition asset that appreciates.
One caveat, stated plainly for window and door companies: none of this fills next month. The timing mismatch catches out every contractor who starts local work because the diary has gone quiet. The correct moment to begin is while you are busy, which is exactly when nobody wants to.
The objection you cannot answer with a discount
A household holding a cheaper quote from a national is not asking you to match the price. They are asking why yours is different. The answer is specification and it has to be concrete: unit make-up, gas fill, spacer bar, hardware guarantee, who does the fitting and what making good includes. Companies that publish that comparison as a standard document lose fewer jobs on price and spend less time defending them.
Service area businesses give something up and should know what
Hiding the address and declaring a service area is the correct configuration for a business that travels to customers, and it costs visibility. The profile still ranks from the registered location, so declaring a wide service area does not extend reach the way people assume. What it does is prevent suppression for an address customers cannot visit. Understanding that distinction ends a lot of wasted argument about why the radius is not working.
Before you spend anything on local SEO
Multiply that gross margin by the share you are willing to spend on acquisition, usually 10 to 20 percent, to get your ceiling per signed customer.
Commit to a fixed test volume and a fixed review date before you start, so the decision to continue is made on data rather than on hope.
Confirm who answers the phone within five minutes during working hours, by name, because every figure above assumes it.
Check that a page exists for windows and doors specifically, rather than a homepage listing every service you offer.
How these figures were built
These figures are a benchmark model, not a survey. They combine an industry base range observed across Western European home-improvement campaigns with a country multiplier for local auction pressure. Treat them as a band to negotiate against, not a quote. Channel figures on this page carry a second layer of modelling on top of the lead-price band, since click cost and conversion rate both vary by market as well as by trade. Treat the spread as the important part rather than either end of it.
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Frequently asked questions
How long before local SEO produces a signed job?
First enquiries take three to nine months. A signed job takes that plus your own sales cycle, which for windows and doors work runs from a few days on urgent jobs to several months on planned ones. Judge the channel on cost per qualified enquiry early and on cost per signed job only after a full cycle has completed.
Should window and door companies use this channel or a different one?
The best long-term investment a windows and doors business can make, and useless as a way to fill next month. The wider point is that these are not competing options. Local search is the long-term asset, purchased leads cover the gap while it matures, and paid advertising is the accelerator you switch on once you know your numbers well enough to calculate what a click is worth.
What is the single biggest mistake in local SEO for this trade?
Treating it as a project rather than a habit. Reviews and local pages decay in relevance, so a burst of activity followed by nine months of silence produces almost nothing.
Does seasonality change the answer for window and door companies?
Materially. Demand peaks late winter and spring and troughs in August, driven by draughts, noise and energy bills. Paid channels follow that curve and get more expensive at the top of it; local search ignores it; purchased volume can be aimed deliberately at the trough, when fewer competitors are bidding for the same households.
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