Local Services Ads, and whether your trade can even get them
Somebody has probably offered to get you Google Guaranteed. For a lot of trades that is a promise they cannot keep.
Search for a plumber in most towns and the first thing on the screen is not a normal ad. It is a short list of businesses with a star rating, a review count and a small green check that says Google Guaranteed. The ordinary text ads sit below that, and the map results below those.
That top block is Local Services Ads, and it is a different product from the search ads underneath it. Different pricing, different setup, different rules about who is allowed in at all. Most of the confusion around it comes from people treating it as one more ad format you can turn on with a budget.
You are paying for the lead, not the click
A normal search ad charges you every time somebody taps it, whether they ring you or close the tab two seconds later. Local Services charges you when somebody actually makes contact, by phone or through the message form attached to your listing.
For trades where people click around comparing before they call anybody, that is a real difference. You stop funding the browsing and start paying for the contact. There is also a dispute process, so a lead that turned out to be somebody selling you insurance, or a job ninety miles outside your area, can be submitted for a credit.
The catch is that a lead is still not a job. You have to answer it, quote it and win it, and the cost per lead only looks good measured against what a booked job is worth to you.
The screening is the whole point
Before anything runs, Google checks you out. License verification, proof of insurance, and a background check run through a third party on the business and, depending on the category, on the people who go into customers' homes.
It takes time and it is genuinely tedious. It is also exactly why the badge is worth having. A homeowner who has never heard of you is being told by Google that somebody looked at your paperwork. Every hurdle in that process is a competitor who did not bother clearing it.
Your trade might not be on the list at all
This is the part that gets left out, and it is the reason this is worth reading before you pay anybody.
Local Services Ads only run for a defined set of categories. Most of them are home services: roofing, plumbing, HVAC, electrical, garage doors, junk removal, pest control, cleaning, landscaping. There is a separate group of licensed professional categories such as law and real estate, and a handful of others besides.
Plenty of good businesses are not on that list. Auto detailing is not. Most retail is not. If what you sell is neither a home service nor a licensed profession, the odds are against you, and no amount of budget changes that.
If somebody offers to get you Google Guaranteed in a category Google does not run, they are selling you something that does not exist.
Check your own category before you hand anyone money to set this up. It is a short conversation now and a much longer one later.
What you give up to sit at the top
Control, mostly. In a regular search campaign you choose the keywords, write the ad and decide which page somebody lands on. In Local Services you do almost none of that. You set a service area and some job types, and Google handles the rest.
Where you rank inside that block is not something you can bid your way to either. It leans on your review count and rating, how close you are to the person searching, whether you are open, and how reliably you respond. Letting leads sit unanswered will quietly cost you position, which is a lever that does not exist in a normal ad account.
Running both is usually the answer
These are not alternatives. Local Services takes the top of the page for the obvious, high intent searches. Regular search ads cover everything that format cannot say: a specific service, a particular roof type, financing, a seasonal offer, anything where the wording matters and you want people landing on a page you wrote.
Most trades doing well on Google are running both and letting each one do the part it is actually good at.
When to leave it alone
Three situations. If your category is not eligible, the question answers itself. If you cannot reliably answer the phone during the hours you are open, you will pay for leads and lose ranking at the same time, which is the worst of both. And if you have almost no reviews, you will sit at the bottom of a block where the review count is the first thing anybody reads.
That last one is worth fixing whatever you decide here. Reviews cost nothing, they lift the map results as well, and they make everything else on the page work harder.
Keep reading
- What a website actually costs, and what you are paying for
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- The first five minutes after a lead comes in
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- Google Ads or SEO, and why the answer is usually both for a while
One of them rents you the top of the page today and stops the day you stop paying. The other takes months and then keeps working. This is how to sequence them when you cannot afford to do everything at once.
- Where your Google Ads budget actually goes
Most wasted ad spend is not bad ads. It is paying full price for searches that were never going to become a customer. Here is what those searches look like and how the money comes back.
- What actually counts as SEO on your own website
Your Google Business Profile can be complete and the website behind it can still be invisible. This is the slower half of SEO, the part that happens on the pages themselves.
- Signs your website is quietly losing you customers
A website does not have to be broken to be losing you work. Here is how to actually check yours, in the few minutes most owners have never spent on it.
- What a website actually does for a small business
Plenty of businesses run fine on word of mouth without one. This is about what changes once you have a website, and the parts people spend money on that do not matter.
- How small businesses actually scale with ads
Ads are not a switch you flip. This walks through what has to be working before you spend a dollar, whether you are chasing leads or orders, and why the first month almost always costs more per sale than the third.
- Your Google Business Profile is doing more work than your website
For most local businesses the map listing decides who calls, not the website. This covers what actually sits in that panel and why the parts most owners skip are the ones that move you up.