Groundline Marketing is a marketing agency for grease trap, geothermal, and water well contractors in Canada and the United States. These are working notes from our own measurements of these three trades — what the search results actually contain, what the numbers actually say, and where the honest answer is that you should not spend anything.
We opened 7,583 listed contractor websites twice, twelve days apart. 386 failed both times — and checking only once would have overstated it by 7.4%, because a timeout is far weaker evidence than a dead domain. The group worth knowing about is the 29 that load perfectly well while showing every new visitor a security warning.
We measured buy-intent search volume in fifteen metro markets. Every one fails a ninety-day Google Ads test — including Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago, and including each market’s best month of the year. Doubling the click share changes nothing, because the constraint was never price.
Of the installers who name a brand, 60.8% name WaterFurnace — so the equipment cannot be your differentiator. Only 35% state their loop types, 7% hold IGSHPA certification, and none of 2,355 states a cost per foot. We read 30 of their own websites too, and half never mention geothermal at all.
99% list a phone number. After that the trades diverge — 95.2% of grease trap contractors have a website against 64.0% of well drillers — but no trade reaches 56% on published opening hours, and the trade with the most websites is worst at it.
48% have traded 40 years or more; only 1.1% are under five. What longevity says when nobody can see the books — and why the oldest names in the trade are 19th-century rendering firms.
We counted every published contractor in our directory. 87% advertise round-the-clock availability; only 43.5% publish their opening hours. What the data says about getting found.
Nobody on page one sells grease trap leads — though contractors are searching to buy them. What an empty lead market means, and when a broker beats an agency.
What customers in the three trades ask Google, measured, and who answers them on video. We sell short explainer films, and these notes say so.
One studio’s own guide puts explainer videos at $1,500 to $50,000; do-it-yourself tools list plans from $15 a month. The three routes, priced from the sellers’ own pages, and what you get and do not get with each. We sell one of them, and say so.
“How does geothermal heating work” gets about 1,600 US searches a month. On the day we checked, the video answers came from a manufacturer, a state energy agency, a dealer network and other YouTube channels. The cold-climate question had no video block at all.
“How does a well work” gets about 4,400 US searches a month. On 1 October 2026 three general YouTube channels answered it on video, and across the water well pages we pulled, the only video we could identify as a drilling company’s own was on the “how deep” page.
“What is a grease trap” gets about 1,300 US searches a month. For how often a trap should be pumped, the top result in both countries was a thread on r/restaurantowners. Who answers on video, and where a local company fits.