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Marketing

Paid search without the wasted spend

Paid search, run tightly. The reason most local Google Ads accounts underperform is not bidding strategy — it is that a meaningful share of the budget is spent on searches that were never going to become work, in places you do not serve, from people looking for a job or a DIY answer.

How it runs

What actually happens, in order

  1. Read the search terms report first

    Week 1

    Not the keywords you chose — the actual phrases that triggered your ads. On a local account that has been running unmanaged, this is where the waste is visible and it is usually uncomfortable: 'how to fix' searches, salary searches, other towns, and competitors' brand names.

  2. Build the negative keyword list properly

    Week 1, then monthly

    Free, DIY, salary, jobs, courses, wholesale, near-miss trades, and every town outside your service area that keeps appearing. This list is the single highest-return hour in most local ad accounts and it needs revisiting monthly, because new waste appears constantly.

  3. Fix the geography

    Week 1

    Radius targeting set to where you will actually travel, and location options set to people physically in that area rather than people showing interest in it — a default that quietly serves your ads statewide. Then bid adjustments by area once there is data on where the work comes from.

  4. Send clicks to a page about the thing they searched for

    Weeks 1–2

    Not the homepage. A campaign for emergency repair and a campaign for planned installation are two different people and need two different pages, both loading fast on mobile data.

  5. Track calls, then measure cost per job

    Week 2, then ongoing

    Most local ad inquiries are phone calls, so an account measuring only form fills is blind to most of its own results. With call tracking in place the real question becomes answerable: which campaigns produce work, not which produce clicks.

Scope

What is included — and what is not

Both lists, because the second one is where projects go wrong and almost nobody publishes it.

  • Full search term audit and negative keyword build
  • Campaign restructure by service and intent
  • Geographic targeting corrected, including the location-options default
  • Call tracking attributed to campaign
  • Conversion tracking verified independently of the ad platform
  • Monthly management, reporting cost per inquiry and cost per job
  • The account stays in your name, with your billing, and we are added as a manager
  • Landing page design and build, which is priced separately so you can see what each part costs
  • Your ad spend, which is paid directly to Google from your own account
  • Display and YouTube campaigns unless there is a specific reason — for most local service businesses they spend budget that search would convert

Straight answers

Questions people actually ask

How much should I spend?
Enough to get meaningful data in your market, which depends on what a click costs for your service — and in some trades that is a great deal more than people expect. Below that threshold the account cannot be optimized because there is nothing to learn from. We will tell you the number before you commit, and tell you if paid search is the wrong channel for your budget.
Is Google Ads worth it for a small local business?
When someone searching has urgent intent and high job value — emergency trades, legal, medical, HVAC in August — yes, often immediately. For low-value or considered purchases the numbers frequently do not work, and we would rather say that than take a management fee to prove it slowly.
My previous agency's reports looked great but I got no work.
Usually one of two things: conversions were counted that were not inquiries — clicks to a phone number, page views, a tag firing on every page load — or calls were never tracked, so the reported cost per lead was measuring form fills only. Both are visible in an hour in the account.
Who owns the account?
You do. It is created under your billing with us added as a manager, so if we part ways you keep the account, the history and the learning. An agency-owned account means starting from zero somewhere else, and that is the point of it.
Should I use Performance Max?
With caution for local service businesses. It spends across Google's whole network with limited visibility into where, and on a small local budget that opacity is a real cost. Standard search campaigns with tight negatives are usually the better starting point, and we can test Performance Max once search is producing.

Related

Usually bought alongside

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Meta advertising for businesses that need local demand, not brand awareness. Built around offers people respond to.

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Start with the free audit. It takes two seconds and it is honest about what it cannot see.

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