I'm Chad, Chief Smarketing Officer at Cube Creative Design. Incline Marketing comes up often enough in conversations with pest control company owners that I decided to write the honest, side-by-side comparison I'd want if I were the one signing the contract. This is not a hit piece. Incline has real, well-documented wins, and I'll say so plainly before I make our case.
We're a marketing agency that works with pest control companies, so yes, I have a side. But a comparison that hides the parts where the other agency is stronger is worthless to you. So here is where Incline wins, where we win, and the trade-offs in between. I'll name the situations where Incline is the better choice, because for some companies it honestly is.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | July 31, 2026
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
I'm Chad, Chief Smarketing Officer at Cube Creative Design. RedBrick Web Solutions comes up often enough in conversations with pest control company owners that I wrote the honest, side-by-side comparison I'd want if I were the one signing the contract. This is not a hit piece. RedBrick does several things well, and I'll say so plainly before I make our case.
We're a marketing agency that works with pest control companies, so yes, I have a side. Here's what makes this comparison different from the others in this series. RedBrick and Cube agree on the same core promise: no long-term lock-in, and full ownership of what gets built for you. So this isn't a fight about who's more honest on that point. It's a fight about proof, pricing, and platform. Those are the three places we actually diverge. I'll name where RedBrick is the better choice, because for some companies it honestly is.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | July 26, 2026
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
I'm Chad, Chief Smarketing Officer at Cube Creative Design. WolfPack Advising comes up often enough in conversations with pest control company owners that I decided to write the honest, side-by-side comparison I'd want if I were the one signing the contract. This is not a hit piece. WolfPack does several things well, and I'll say so plainly before I make our case.
We're a marketing agency that works with pest control companies, so yes, I have a side. But a comparison that hides the parts where the other guy is stronger is worthless to you. So here is where WolfPack wins, where we win, and the trade-offs in between. I'll name the situations where WolfPack is the better choice, because for some companies it honestly is.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | July 24, 2026
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
If your pest control website is getting less traffic than it used to, you are not behind on some secret everyone else figured out. You are sitting inside an industry-wide decline that started in 2024, and most of the field is still in denial about it. The traffic did not wander off for no reason, and the good news is that the reasons are knowable. This post is how you find yours.
I run a marketing agency that works with companies like yours, and I want to be straight about where this comes from: I ran the same audit method on my own site and on 300 pest control companies across the country before writing a word of it. The pattern was the same almost everywhere. Organic traffic down, map pack visibility shaky, and the playbook that worked from 2018 to 2023 quietly stopped paying out around the same moment.
Here is the short version of why your traffic dropped, so an answer is on the table before the details: the 2024 search changes took a chunk of it, and on-site problems you may not know about took the rest. The next sections help you tell how much of each is hitting your site, and where to start.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | July 22, 2026
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
A few weeks ago, the owner of a small family pest company in Maryland posted a question in an industry forum. Their residential business had seen a "drastic decline" over three months compared to last year. They had three suspects: AI changing how people search, an unusually cold winter, or the way they market on the web.
If your pest control leads are down this year, you've probably asked the same question. I run a marketing agency that works with pest control business owners, and this is one of the most common calls I get, usually right when the phone should be busiest. The usual answer is "probably all three." That's likely true, and it leaves you no closer to a fix.
So this guide does two things. First, it shows you how to tell a normal seasonal dip from a real problem. Then it gives you the 20-minute diagnostic I gave that owner, which uses data you already have to name the cause. After that, I'll cover what's quietly squeezing phone calls in 2026, the two fixes worth building, and what changed with Local Services Ads.
One thing up front, so you don't spend the whole article bracing for bad news. Some of the drop almost certainly isn't your fault. The ground under pest control marketing shifted in 2024, and it shifted for everyone. But "it isn't your fault" is not the same as "there's nothing to do."
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | July 08, 2026
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
You're comparing Cube Creative Design and IronChess SEO. Good. You run a pest control company with somewhere between 11 and 30 trucks, your route board has good weeks and slow weeks, and two agencies are in your inbox promising the same thing: more calls, better rankings, your phone ringing. One of them is us. The other is IronChess SEO. You're trying to tell them apart before you write a check, and the websites aren't making it easy.
I'm Chad, and I run pest control marketing at Cube Creative Design. We work with pest control companies and nobody who sells homes, cars, or insurance. I have an obvious stake in which way you lean, so I'm going to tell you exactly where that bias sits, give you only verifiable facts about IronChess, and then hand you the questions that actually settle this.
Yes, I wrote this, and yes, I want your business. So does IronChess. The difference I'm betting on isn't that we want it more. It's how we earn it. There are things an agency can publish in plain sight: its prices, its results with real numbers, who owns the work when you leave. There are things it can keep behind a sales call. We publish ours. Where IronChess does not publish something, I'll say "not published" and leave it there. You're smart enough to draw a conclusion from a blank line.
If I skip the parts that make us look bad, nothing else on this page is worth reading. So I'll start with what makes IronChess appealing, because the appeal is real.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | July 04, 2026
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
You are paying a marketing agency every month, and you genuinely cannot tell if it is working. The reports look busy. The numbers mostly go up. But the only number you actually care about, booked jobs, has been flat, and nobody wants to say so out loud. If that is where you are, you are not being paranoid. You are asking the right question, and most owners never ask it directly.
I run an agency that competes for pest control marketing work, so take this for what it is: an honest framework from someone on the inside. Plenty of agencies earn their fee. Plenty coast. The difference is not how polished the report looks. It is whether the work produces leads and booked jobs that you can trace back to the money you spent. This post gives you the metrics that matter, the red flags that should worry you, and the exact conversation to have before you decide to stay or go.
One fair warning before you judge anyone, including yourself, if you run marketing in-house. The channel changed in 2024, and results that dropped industry-wide are not automatically your agency's fault. The skill is telling "they stopped earning it" apart from "the whole field got harder." Both are real, and the rest of this guide helps you tell which one you are looking at.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | July 03, 2026
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
Pest control marketing stops working for one of five reasons, and they usually show up together: the search channel changed under you, your website quietly stopped converting, your local presence went stale, your agency stopped earning its fee, or the math on your cost per lead stopped adding up. If you are asking why your pest control marketing is not working anymore, the answer is almost always one or more of those five, not bad luck.
Here is the good news buried in that. Marketing rarely breaks for some mysterious reason you will never figure out. It breaks for reasons you can name, and naming the reason is most of the fix. Your marketing used to work. The phone rang, the route board filled, and you did not spend much time wondering where the calls came from. Then it slowed down, either as a quiet quarter that turned into a quiet year or as a sudden drop nobody warned you about.
I run a marketing agency that works with pest control companies, and I want to be straight with you about where these numbers come from. They are not borrowed from some generic small business blog. In 2026, I evaluated 300 pest control companies across the country, putting their websites, SEO, and Google Business Profiles through the same review I run for clients. That audit is the closest thing our industry has to a mirror right now, and most owners do not love what they see in it. This guide walks through all five root causes, shows you how to tell which one is hitting you, and gives you the order to fix them.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | July 01, 2026
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
You wrap up the last stop on a Friday route, get home, eat dinner, then open your Google Business Profile to catch up on paperwork. Three new reviews this week. Two five-stars and a three-star. You give the five-stars a thumbs up and a copy-paste "Thanks!" The three-star sits unanswered for days because you're not sure how to respond to a pest control review that's lukewarm and specific.
That's the default for a lot of pest control businesses, and it's also why some of the best operators in town are missing from the local map pack. Every review response is content. Every response is a signal to Google that the profile is alive. And every response is a billboard for the customers reading reviews before they ever pick up the phone.
This is a tactical post for pest control companies that already get reviews but aren't sure what to write back. We'll cover what to say to the good reviews, the middle-of-the-road reviews, the one-stars, and the fakes, plus how fast to respond and who should be the one writing.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | June 30, 2026
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
You spent real money on your pest control website. The homepage looks sharp, your phone number sits in the header, and your services are listed in the menu. But the service pages themselves often do nothing. They don't bring in calls, they don't show up when someone searches "termite treatment near me," and they sit there like a service truck stuck in the shop with a busted alternator. After auditing 300 websites built for pest control companies in 2026, the same pattern keeps showing up: service pages that look fine to a visitor but read like wallpaper to Google.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | June 29, 2026
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
If you have ever wondered why a competitor with a worse website outranks you in the map pack, the answer usually sits inside their Google Business Profile, not their website. We audited 300 pest control websites going into 2026 and pulled the GBP data alongside it. The patterns repeat from Charlotte to Cleveland: incomplete profiles, mis-pinned service areas, residential addresses, and review counts that have not moved since 2022. This is the GBP companion piece to our pest control geo-page guide, written specifically for pest control companies trying to figure out why their local visibility has stalled.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | June 26, 2026
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
Geo-pages are not optional anymore for any pest control company trying to compete past its own ZIP code. But here is the part nobody tells you up front: building them wrong is worse than not building them at all. Think of it like termite bait stations. Putting a hundred of them in the ground does nothing if none are placed where the termites actually feed. The data backs that up, and the rest of this post shows you exactly where the bait should go.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | June 25, 2026
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
