Do groundworkers win work from Google or word of mouth? Both, and the order matters far more than the split
A site manager needs a groundworks gang for a nine plot development starting in three weeks. He does not type "groundworkers near me" into Google. He asks the quantity surveyor who they used on the last site, gets two names, and writes them on the back of a drawing.
That is word of mouth, and it is still how the overwhelming majority of groundworks work in Britain is won. Anyone telling a groundworker otherwise has not spent much time near a site office. But watch what he does next, because this is the part that decides which of those two names gets rung first. He types one of them into his phone. Not to discover anybody, he already has the name. He is checking it, and wants a real business with a real company number behind it. One name returns that. The other returns a Facebook page last updated in 2023 and a Yell listing with no reviews. Both gangs may be equally good. Only one still looks like a going concern at eight o'clock at night.
Both, in that order. Most groundworks work in the UK arrives by referral, from main contractors, developers, civils firms and other trades, so word of mouth wins the introduction. Google decides what happens next, because the person holding your name looks it up before they call. A groundworker's website is not there to find work. It is there to survive the search for your own name.
Word of mouth really does win most groundworks work, and that is not the argument
Groundworks is one of the few trades where the customer is usually another business, and referral is genuinely the dominant route in.
It is worth saying plainly before anything else, because the usual version of this article pretends otherwise and every groundworker reading it knows better. Across the UK, foundations, drainage, muck shifting, substructure and external works come down the chain from housebuilders, main contractors, civils firms and developers. Those relationships are built on site, over years, and they are not replaced by a search result. If you are a three gang outfit in the North West with two housebuilders who keep coming back, your marketing problem is not a lack of leads.
So this is not the argument that you need to start chasing strangers on the internet. The argument is narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss: every one of those referrals passes through a checking step, and that step now happens on a phone. The same is true further down the ladder. A builder or main contractor who is short a groundworks gang in March is working from a name and a mobile number, and the first thing they do with the name is look at it.
The referral gets checked, and the check happens on Google
The moment your name is passed to somebody is the moment it gets typed into a search box.
This is the bit that has changed, and it has changed for business buyers as much as for householders. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey for 2026 reports that 96% of consumers read reviews for local businesses. That figure is about consumers rather than contract managers, and I am not going to pretend a quantity surveyor behaves identically to somebody choosing a plasterer. But the direction is not in dispute, and the contract manager has more riding on the decision, not less.
What interests me more than the survey is what the checker actually finds when they look. I ran a sweep of Google listings across three market towns in one corner of rural England earlier this month, Ludlow, Craven Arms and Church Stretton in Shropshire, covering 18 trades. It returned 333 listing rows, which deduplicate by business name and phone number to 234 distinct businesses. Within that, 48 businesses sit in the groundwork adjacent bracket: builders, driveway contractors and landscapers, the three categories a small groundworks firm in a rural English market town is most likely to be listed under. Here is what their listings look like.
Google listings for builders, driveway contractors and landscapers in Ludlow, Craven Arms and Church Stretton, swept September 2026, deduplicated by business name and phone number. One non trading outlier with 5,345 reviews removed. No business is named.
Nineteen of the 48 showed no review count whatsoever, and among the 29 that did, the median was six. Eight businesses out of 48 had twenty reviews or more. That is the number I would put in front of any groundworker who thinks reviews are a homeowner's game: the bar in this trade is on the floor. You are not trying to out review a crowded field. You are trying to be the one result on the page that a stranger can verify at all.
How the listings were read
These are Google Business Profile listings as they appear to somebody searching, not a survey and not a claim about the businesses themselves. A firm with no website field may well have a site that is not linked from the listing, and a firm with no review count may simply never have asked. That is the point rather than a caveat: the checker sees the listing, not the truth behind it. The same sweep found 67 of the full 234 businesses with no website at all, and among those the median review count was seven, with fifteen of them carrying twenty or more. Strong local reputations, completely invisible to anyone who was not already told about them.
What the distribution actually means for you
Word of mouth leaves no public trace. That is its defining weakness, and it is invisible to the person benefiting from it, because the jobs keep arriving and nothing appears to be wrong. The losses are silent. You never hear about the site manager who had two names, checked both, and rang the other one. This is the same pattern I wrote about in how customers decide you are legit, and it holds just as firmly when the customer is a contracts department.
Three routes work arrives by, and each one checks you differently
A groundworker usually has three separate buyers, and what satisfies one of them is close to irrelevant to the other two.
| Route in | Who checks you | What they are checking | What closes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main contractor subcontract | Contract manager or QS | That you are solvent, insured, CIS registered and safe to put on a list | One page they can forward to procurement without editing it |
| Developer or self build direct | The client or their project manager | Whether you have done ground like theirs, and whether you turn up | Photographs of comparable schemes with the conditions named |
| Homeowner direct | The householder | Whether you are a real business and not a man with a digger | A search result with reviews and finished work on it |
Most groundworks websites in the UK, on the rare occasions they exist, are built for the third row and then used almost entirely by the first. That mismatch is why so many of them feel thin. A gallery of driveways does very little for a contract manager who needs to know your employers' liability cover level before Friday.
What a contract manager verifies before you go on the list
Nearly everything procurement asks a new groundworks subcontractor for is a fact that could simply have been published.
This is the practical heart of it, and it is the part that genuinely separates groundworks from the trades I usually build for. The check is not a feeling about whether your work looks nice. It is a list, and the list barely varies between contractors.
The CIS detail worth putting on the page
Under the Construction Industry Scheme, a contractor must verify a subcontractor with HMRC before the first payment, and HMRC tells them which rate to apply. A registered subcontractor is paid under deduction at the standard rate of 20%. One who cannot be matched or is not registered is deducted at the higher rate of 30%. Subcontractors with gross payment status are paid with no deduction at all. None of that is a secret, and stating your position on your own website removes a round of emails from the start of every new relationship. On the prequalification side, Build UK's Common Assessment Standard is the industry agreed question set, certified annually by a Recognised Assessment Body and now including a building safety section, which is why a growing number of principal contractors will accept it instead of issuing their own questionnaire.
So what does that make the website?
A verification page with a portfolio attached, rather than a portfolio with a phone number attached.
Six pages does it. Home, what you do, schemes, credentials, area covered, contact. The credentials page is the one that earns its keep, and it is the one almost nobody builds.
Do I need a blog? No. Nothing about this route in rewards publishing weekly. Get the six pages right and leave it.
Is Facebook enough instead? It is better than nothing, and it is not a business record. A contract manager cannot forward a Facebook page to procurement. The same trade off plays out in website versus Facebook for a fencing contractor, where the split in a real sample was not what the argument assumes.
What about the homeowner side? If you take drives, drainage and footings direct, that is a genuinely different buyer with a different clock, much as a damp proofing site has to serve three separate buyers at once. Give it its own page rather than blending it into the contractor facing copy.
What it costs to be checkable
One plot of groundworks is worth more than a decade of the website that helped you win it.
I build these for £50 every four weeks with no build fee, so there is nothing to pay on the day you start. That covers the site, hosting, the domain, SSL, backups and unlimited small text and photo edits, which matters in this trade because your evidence changes every time a scheme completes. Across a year it is £650, and because it is billed every four weeks that is thirteen payments rather than twelve. It is also a business expense, so it comes off your profit before HMRC takes a view of it.
The comparison that actually matters
Set that against one substructure package. Against a single nine plot job it is a rounding error, and it is considerably less than the diesel for a week. The question was never whether a groundworker can afford a website. It is whether the name on the back of that drawing survives being typed into a phone.