Paid search is the honest lever. Everything else in local marketing asks you to wait, and the waiting is real — profile work takes weeks to show, content takes months, links take longer still. Advertising is the one channel where a decision on Monday changes the phone volume on Tuesday.
That immediacy is also why it destroys so much money. The feedback loop is fast enough to feel productive while the account quietly bleeds on broad-match terms nobody sane would buy.
Search ads should be narrow, and mostly negative
The single largest source of waste in local Google Ads accounts is not bid strategy or ad copy. It is paying for searches that were never going to become customers — job seekers, students writing papers, people looking for DIY instructions, and businesses in cities you do not serve.
Fixing that is mostly subtractive work. It means reading search term reports every week and adding negatives, tightening match types, restricting geography to the areas you will genuinely drive to, and running dayparting when your phone is not answered. A well-run local account usually has a longer negative keyword list than positive one.
Ann Arbor adds two local wrinkles. The student population generates enormous query volume with almost no commercial value for most trades, and the same terms behave completely differently in September than in June. And geographic targeting by radius is unreliable here because the drive time from downtown to Dexter bears no relation to the map distance during football traffic.
Detail on running Google Ads for a local service business.
Local Services Ads sit above everything, when your trade qualifies
For the trades that are eligible, Local Services Ads occupy the space above both the map pack and the search ads, and they are charged per lead rather than per click. That combination is hard to beat.
The constraint is eligibility. Google restricts these to specific eligible service categories, and getting in requires passing a verification and screening process rather than simply setting a budget. Licence and insurance documentation has to hold up. Some categories are also geographically limited.
Where a business qualifies, this is usually the first paid channel we would set up, ahead of standard search ads. Where it does not, it is worth five minutes to confirm rather than an assumption either way.
See how Local Services Ads eligibility and setup works.
Retargeting is cheap because the audience is small
Most people who visit a local service website do not call on the first visit. They are comparing, or checking with a partner, or they got interrupted. Retargeting puts you back in front of exactly those people for a fraction of what it cost to reach them the first time.
The discipline is restraint. Local audiences are small, frequency caps matter enormously, and an advert that follows someone around for six weeks produces irritation rather than calls. We run short windows, tight caps, and creative that references the specific service the person looked at rather than generic brand messaging.
Our page on retargeting visitors who did not convert covers the audience structure and the caps we use.
The relationship between paid and organic
These channels are usually sold as alternatives. They work better as a sequence.
Advertising produces something more valuable than the leads themselves: real data about which queries convert for your business, in your market, at what cost. That data should then direct the organic work. If a term produces customers at a good cost per lead in paid, it deserves a page built to rank for it organically. If it produces nothing after enough clicks to be sure, it should not get a page at all.
Done that way, the ad budget funds the discovery, the organic work captures the same demand more cheaply over time, and the ad spend can eventually be reduced or redirected to the terms too competitive to win organically. Businesses that never make that transition pay retail for every lead, forever.
The organic side is covered under ongoing local SEO and content work.
What we will not do with your ad budget
We will not run a campaign we cannot measure. If calls are not tracked and forms are not recorded as conversions, we fix that before spending anything, because otherwise the optimisation is guesswork dressed up as expertise.
We will not keep a campaign running to protect a management fee. When paid search is not working for a business — usually because the margin per job cannot support the cost per lead in that category — the correct advice is to stop, and we will give it.
And we will not hold your account hostage. You own the Google Ads account, the historical data and the conversion tracking. If you leave, it goes with you.
Call 734-747-3922 or request a free audit. If you already run ads, bring the last ninety days of search terms and we will tell you what you are wasting before you hire anyone.