When someone in your area needs a trade, they search on their phone and take one of the first options they see. What they see first depends on the service, the location and the search itself. Where Local Services Ads are available for that trade and area, they appear at the very top, then the map pack with three businesses, then everything else. For other trades, or other places, the map pack and ordinary ads lead.
So check which placements appear for your own services, in the areas you cover, before deciding where to invest. Search the way a customer would, on a phone, from somewhere in your patch.
The good news is that both are earned mostly through doing the basics well and consistently, not through spending the most money. This is how to approach them.
Google Business Profile: the front door
Your Google Business Profile is what appears in the map pack and in the knowledge panel when someone searches your name. For many trades it produces as many enquiries as the website, sometimes more. To find out which is true for you, reconcile the profile's calls and messages with your lead log before comparing them with website leads, because a tap on the call button isn't always a genuine enquiry.
The basics that matter: the right primary category (an aerial installer should not be listed as an electrician), a service area that matches where you work, accurate opening hours including whether you answer at weekends, and a phone number that is the same as the one on your website and in directories.
Beyond the basics, keep the profile current. Add photos of real jobs, not stock images. List every service with a short description. Answer the questions people leave. Use the posts feature when you have something worth saying.
Be clear about why you're doing this. Photos, services and answers help a customer decide whether to ring you, and that alone makes them worth the time. Whether they lift your ranking is less certain: Google says local results depend on relevance, distance and prominence, and doesn't say that posting regularly moves you up. Do it for the customer and treat any ranking benefit as a bonus.
Reviews: quantity, recency and replies
Reviews weigh heavily on whether someone chooses you from the map pack. Google also says review count and score feed into prominence, one of the things that decides whether you appear there at all.
Three things count: how many you have, how recent they are, and whether you reply. To a customer, a business with 40 reviews from three years ago can look less alive than one with 25 reviews where the last one was this week.
Make a neutral review request part of completing each job, sent when the job is finished and working. A text with a direct link to your review form, sent from the van before you drive off, is a simple way to do it. Ask every customer, not just the ones you expect to be pleased.
Reply to every review, including the bad ones. A calm, factual reply to a one-star review helps prospective customers judge how you handle a problem, and they will read it.
Local Services Ads: paying per lead, not per click
Local Services Ads are the listings at the very top of results, carrying a Google verification badge. They work differently from normal Google Ads: you pay per lead (a call or message), not per click. Google's lead-credit guidance says credits for leads that weren't genuine are not available to advertisers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, so in the UK expect to pay for every lead you're charged for. The badge name and these rules have changed over time, so check Google's current UK terms for your trade before you rely on either.
To run them you go through a verification process covering your business details, insurance and, for some trades, background checks. It takes time and is worth starting early.
Google's guidance says ranking within Local Services Ads depends on things like your location relative to the customer, your review score and number of reviews, how responsive you are to enquiries, and your opening hours. Budget is not the only lever. A business that lets calls ring out is working against one of the factors it can control.
That makes call handling part of marketing, not separate from it. In practice:
- Make sure someone, or a call answering service, picks up during the hours your ads run.
- Set the ad schedule to the hours you can answer, not the hours you wish you could.
- Ring back every missed lead the same day, and log it, so you can see if misses are creeping up.
- Reply to message leads as fast as you would a call.
Reply to every review, including the bad ones.
How the two work together
Local Services Ads and Google Business Profile share your reviews. Effort put into reviews improves both at once. They also share the requirement that your business details are consistent everywhere.
A typical pattern for a trades business: Local Services Ads catch the urgent, high-intent searches ('aerial not working', 'emergency repair'). The map pack catches people comparing options and reading reviews. Standard search ads fill gaps for specific services and areas where the other two are thin.
Track all three separately, with call tracking and form tracking, so you know what each one costs per enquiry and per job. Without that you will end up funding whichever one feels busiest.
Checks to make before increasing spend
Work through these before you put more money in:
- The wrong primary category, or too many categories, diluting relevance.
- A service area set to the whole of London when the business only travels to a few boroughs, which wastes leads and annoys customers.
- No process for asking for reviews, so they arrive at random and mostly from unhappy customers.
- Missed calls from Local Services Ads, which work against your ranking and waste the leads you paid for.
- Different phone numbers on the website, the profile and directories.
None of these is hard to fix. Most can be sorted in an afternoon. The difficult part is keeping the habits going, which is where having someone accountable for it each month makes the difference.
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