Google Ads for Contractors

Local Services Ads are the Google Guaranteed listings that sit above the paid results, charged per lead rather than per click. You have to pass verification first, covering licence, insurance and a background check, and not every trade or area is eligible, so the first question is whether you qualify at all. Where they are available they often beat Search on cost per booked job for home services, partly because you pay for a contact rather than a click and partly because unqualified or wrong-number leads can be disputed and credited if you raise them promptly, which most contractors forget to do. Ranking within LSA leans on reviews, responsiveness and proximity rather than bids, so answering the phone quickly is literally a ranking input. Compare them with arithmetic: your cost per LSA lead divided by the share that become jobs, against your Search cost per booked job.

A negative keyword list, built from your own search-term report rather than from a template someone posted online. The obvious blockers go in on day one, including how to, DIY, video, salary, jobs, courses, parts, free, and the names of the big-box retailers, but the ones that actually cost you money are specific to your trade and only appear once traffic starts. Review search terms weekly for the first month and monthly after that. Starting in phrase and exact match rather than broad limits the damage while you learn, because broad match with a thin negative list is how contractor budgets disappear. Quantify it before and after by adding up the clicks on terms you would never want and multiplying by your average cost per click. Most accounts we look at have a leak large enough that fixing it matters more than any bidding change.

Enormously, and it is measurable. Take what you pay per click and how many clicks it takes to generate a call, and you have the cost of the call that rang out, because you paid for it either way and it went to whoever picked up next. Fix it in the cheapest order that works. Call forwarding to a second person costs nothing and solves a surprising amount. A human answering service is the next step and for many contractors it is the right one, and we will say so rather than sell you software. Above that sits an automatic text back within seconds that qualifies the job, checks the address is in your area and offers times, which is what /services/ai-lead-recovery does. Before spending anything more on ads, count the missed calls in your phone log for one week and price them at your average job value.