Local Service Ads, run properly.
Google Local Service Ads sit above everything else in the results and charge you per lead instead of per click. That changes the whole job: screening, ranking factors and dispute discipline decide whether they pay.
4.9 on Google30+ verified reviews
You pay for the lead, not the click.
That single difference makes Local Service Ads a completely different discipline from paid search. There is no keyword list to optimise and no landing page to test. What decides your result is your profile, your responsiveness, your reviews, and how rigorously somebody disputes the charges you should not be paying.
Screening comes first
License, insurance and background checks have to clear before anything runs, and the paperwork is where most contractors stall for weeks. Getting it through cleanly is unglamorous and it is most of the setup work.
Answer the phone
Responsiveness feeds ranking directly. Missed calls do not just cost you that job, they reduce how often you are shown. This is the most common reason a contractor concludes the channel does not work when the channel was working and nobody picked up.
Dispute relentlessly
You will be charged for wrong numbers, out of area callers, spam and people wanting a service you do not offer. Those are disputable and most contractors never bother. Consistent disputing is the difference between a channel that pays and one that quietly bleeds.
Where it fits, and where it does not
This is a good channel for some trades and a poor one for others, and we will tell you which before you sign up rather than after.
Strong for emergency and service work
Somebody with a burst pipe or no heat wants the top result and a phone number. The format suits that perfectly, the lead prices are usually justified by the job, and the badge does real work on a stranger deciding in under a minute.
Weaker for long consideration work
Somebody nine months from a kitchen remodel is not calling the top result today. Paying per lead for people at the beginning of a long research process is usually a poor trade compared with content and organic visibility.
It does not replace search or the site
The ads sit above organic results and the map pack, so they take a slice of a page you should also be occupying underneath. Treating them as a substitute for the rest of the work means renting a position instead of owning one.
Budget behaves differently
You set a weekly budget and Google decides how many leads to send, which makes spend less predictable than paid search. Worth knowing before it surprises you in a busy week.
What we actually do every month.
Get you verified and keep you verified
Initial screening, then the renewals and re verifications that lapse quietly and switch your ads off without much warning.
Review every charged lead
Every week, not every quarter. Wrong numbers, out of area calls and services you do not offer get disputed on a routine rather than when somebody remembers.
Tune service types and area
The categories you accept and the geography you cover decide the mix of calls. Narrowing both usually raises quality more than raising the budget does.
Watch response time as a metric
Because it is a ranking factor, not just an operational nicety. If missed calls are hurting your visibility we will say so plainly, even when the fix is on your side of the phone.
Worth knowing before you start: these ads are not available for every trade or every market, and the service categories Google offers do not always map neatly onto what you actually do. We check availability and category fit first, because there is no point building a plan around a channel your business cannot access or that will only send you the half of your work you least want.
One honest caveat about the badge. Google Guaranteed is a real trust signal to a homeowner who has never heard of you, and it is genuinely worth having. It is not a quality endorsement, it is a screening check plus a limited backstop for the customer, and contractors sometimes over read what it says about them. We treat it as what it is: a useful piece of borrowed credibility at the top of the results, working hardest on exactly the customers who have no other reason to trust you.
The other thing worth setting expectations on is lead quality variance. Some weeks the mix is excellent and some weeks it is wrong numbers and tyre kickers, and that swing is normal rather than a sign something is broken. Judging the channel on a single week will lead you to switch it off in a bad one. We look at a rolling window and at the disputed proportion, because those two together tell you whether it is actually working.
Runs alongside paid search and organic search rather than instead of them. See what it costs.
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