Search for a plumber, a locksmith or a personal injury lawyer and the very first thing on the page is often a row of business cards with a checkmark badge, star ratings and a phone number. Those are Local Services Ads. They sit above the regular Google Ads, above the map pack, and above every organic result, which makes them worth understanding even if you never buy one.
How they differ from ordinary Google Ads
- You pay per lead, not per click. A charge is made when someone calls, messages or books through the ad, not when they look at it.
- There are no keywords to choose. You select the types of job you want and the areas you serve. Google decides which searches to show you for.
- There is no ad copy to write. The ad is built from your business details and your reviews.
- You have to pass verification first. That is what the badge represents.
- Only certain trades are eligible. Mostly home services, plus a set of professional services such as law, real estate, and financial planning. The list varies by country and keeps growing.
The badge: what changed
For years these ads carried one of several labels: Google Guaranteed for home services, Google Screened for professionals, and a few others. In October 2025 Google replaced them all with a single badge, Google Verified. The money-back guarantee that went with the old Google Guaranteed label was discontinued at the same time.
If your website, van or printed material still says "Google Guaranteed", it is out of date, and the promise it implies no longer exists. Change it.
What verification involves
Requirements depend on the trade and the state, but expect some combination of:
- Proof the business is registered and the owner is who they say they are.
- A current trade license where the work requires one.
- Proof of liability insurance.
- Background checks on the owner, and in some categories on staff who visit homes.
- A verified Google Business Profile linked to the ads account.
Allow a few weeks. The usual delays are mismatched names across documents and expired insurance certificates. Verification has to be kept current too: if a license lapses, the ads stop.
What decides who appears
You cannot bid your way to the top in the way ordinary ads allow. Google ranks Local Services Ads on a mix of factors it has described publicly:
- Proximity to the person searching.
- Review count and rating. These are your Google reviews, shared with your Business Profile.
- Responsiveness. How often and how quickly you answer the calls and messages the ads send. Missed calls push you down.
- Business hours. You are only shown when you are marked as open.
- Budget and bidding settings.
- Complaints. Serious or repeated ones reduce visibility.
Notice how much of that list is ordinary local SEO. A business with forty recent reviews and a habit of answering the phone will get more from the same budget than one with six reviews and a full voicemail.
What a lead costs, and what counts as one
Cost per lead varies widely by trade and city. Emergency plumbing in a large metro costs several times what lawn care in a small town does, and legal leads cost far more than either. Google shows an estimate when you set up, and that figure is the one to plan with.
Not every lead is a customer. You will be charged for some calls that turn out to be the wrong service, outside your area, or a sales pitch. Google credits invalid leads, and now does most of that automatically, without the manual dispute process that used to exist. The crediting is imperfect, so budget on the assumption that a share of paid leads will be worthless, and judge the channel on cost per booked job.
Setting one up properly
- Sort out your Google Business Profile first. Name, address and categories should match your license and registration exactly.
- Choose job types narrowly. Tick only the work you want. Every extra box is a category of lead you will pay for.
- Draw the service area honestly. Include only places you would happily drive to.
- Set hours to when someone will answer. Ads running to an unanswered phone cost money and damage your ranking.
- Start with a modest weekly budget and review after a month.
- Add photos of real work and of the team.
- Mark every lead in the dashboard as booked or not. It trains the system and gives you real numbers.
Getting more from the same spend
- Answer every call. This is the largest single factor within your control. If you cannot, use an answering service during the hours your ads run.
- Reply to messages within minutes. People message three businesses and hire the first to respond.
- Keep reviews coming. They rank the ad, the profile and the map listing together. See Google reviews and SEO.
- Listen to the call recordings. They show which job types send good leads and how well your phone is being answered.
- Pause, do not delete. When you are fully booked, pause the ads. Deleting loses your history.
Are they worth it?
For many home-service trades, yes. The leads are people ready to hire, the position is the best on the page, and paying per call is easier to reason about than paying per click. They tend to work best for urgent, common jobs.
The limits are real, though:
- You rent the position. Stop paying and the calls stop that day.
- You have little control. No keywords, no copy, no choice over which searches you appear for.
- Lead quality is uneven, and the pricing is set by Google.
- The leads belong to the platform. Callers often do not remember your name afterwards.
How this fits with SEO
Local Services Ads and local SEO are not alternatives. The ads buy calls now. SEO builds the map and organic rankings that produce calls without a fee attached to each one. The sensible pattern for most trades is to run the ads while the organic side is being built, then lean on them less as the map listing and the website start carrying the load. Because both draw on the same reviews and the same profile, the groundwork is shared.
We compare paid and earned search more broadly in SEO vs Google Ads, and explain the map results in how to rank in the map pack. What we do is the profile, reviews and website work that makes both channels perform, through our local SEO service. The free audit will show how that groundwork looks today.