Local Services Ads

I have watched a homeowner search for a plumber on her phone. She did not scroll. She did not compare websites. She looked at the first three names with a green checkmark and a star rating, and she tapped the one closest to her. The whole decision took less time than it takes to read this paragraph.

That top block, with the checkmark and the phone button, is Local Services Ads. If you run a trade or a home service business, it deserves a lesson of its own, because it behaves nothing like the search ads from the Google Ads lesson. It is only open in certain trades and areas, so check Google’s eligibility page first.

What you are actually buying

With a regular search ad you pay when someone clicks, whether or not they ever call. With Local Services Ads you pay when someone contacts you through the ad: a call, a message, a booking. No click-happy competitor can drain your budget by tapping your ad forty times. You set a weekly budget, which limits how many leads you will pay for, and Google decides how often to show you within that.

To appear there at all, you go through screening. Google checks your business license, your insurance, and runs background checks on the owner and in some trades on the people you send into homes. When you pass, you get the badge: Google Guaranteed for most home services, Google Screened for professional services. That badge is why the homeowner on her phone did not scroll. It does part of your trust-building for you before you have said a word.

What moves you up or down

Here is the distinction that trips people up. In search ads, your position is mostly a matter of bids and ad quality. In Local Services Ads, position is driven by things that look a lot like running a good business. Your review count and rating together, and volume matters; a business with many good reviews tends to outrank one with a handful of perfect ones. How close you are to the person searching. How fast you respond when a lead comes in, and Google tracks this. Your hours; being open longer than the competition helps. Your weekly budget. And whether the service categories you enabled are the ones you actually do.

Look at that list. Four of the six are about how you operate, and only the budget is about how you advertise. Do you answer inside five minutes? Do you ask every happy customer for a review? Are you honest about which services you offer? If yes, this channel rewards you. If not, no amount of budget fixes it.

Only turn on the categories you genuinely service. Enabling everything to get more leads gets you leads you cannot serve, and you pay for those.

Bad leads and what to do about them

Not every lead is a lead. You will get robocalls, spam, people outside your area, and requests for services you do not offer. Google credits some of these back automatically, particularly the obviously fake ones, but do not expect it to catch a geographic mismatch or a wrong service type. The days of arguing each bad lead with a human are largely gone; the crediting is automated now, and you should build a little waste into your expectations.

What you can do is keep clean records. Mark every lead in the dashboard as booked, not booked or not a lead, and note why. That record protects you when credits are in question and, more usefully, it tells you your real cost per booked job rather than the flattering cost per lead.

One warning from experience: never let this be your only channel. We see this with any channel you do not own: when the rules change, your leads change with them, and businesses that built everything on this one have woken up to a sudden drop with no other pipe running. It is a strong channel and a poor foundation.

When it beats search ads, and when it does not

Local Services Ads win for pure “I need someone now” intent: plumber near me, emergency electrician, AC not working. The searcher wants a trustworthy local name and a phone button, and that is exactly what the format gives them. Search ads win for specific or research-stage searches that the local format does not capture well: tankless water heater installation in your town, panel upgrade, new roof estimate. Those people want a page that answers their question before they call.

Most trades I have worked with do best running both, with the local ads catching the urgent calls and the search campaign catching the considered projects. Track cost per booked job for each channel and keep whichever wins in your market. If you can only start with one and you are in a trade that gets emergency calls, start here. The screening takes a few weeks anyway, so begin the paperwork before you need it.

Start the verification

Start the verification this week. Gather your license number, your insurance certificate and the names of anyone who will need a background check. While that processes, ask your last ten happy customers for a review and set a rule in your office that every incoming lead gets a response within five minutes during business hours. Those two habits will do more for your ranking than the budget will.

What it costs

Expect three to five hours of your time to gather documents, complete the profile and enable the right categories, plus a waiting period for the background checks that you do not control. Once live, it needs a few minutes a day to respond to and mark leads. Cost is per lead, capped by the weekly budget you set, and it varies widely by trade and market, so start conservative and raise it once you see what a booked job actually costs you.

One question to settle before you start: what would you do next month if this channel stopped working?