Google Ads for a local business: Local Services Ads or Search?

by Harry Watts · 10 October 2026 · 10 min read

Google gives a local business two ways to advertise on search: Local Services Ads, where you pay per lead, and ordinary Search campaigns, where you pay per click. Which to start with isn't a matter of taste. First check whether Google offers Local Services Ads for your trade in your country at all. If it does, run both and compare leads, cost per lead and what each customer costs. If it doesn't, Search is the route, and the money is won or lost on how you draw the area, which searches you pay for, and whether you count the phone calls.

Two ways to advertise a local business on Google

Local Services Ads are shown prominently on some searches, such as “plumber near me”, and in many categories carry a “Google Verified” badge once a business has passed Google's checks. They're a separate product from Google Ads. You don't choose keywords or write ads: you build a profile, pass Google's checks, set a weekly budget, and pay when a customer calls or messages you through the ad. In the UK, those calls and messages are the only kinds of lead. Bookings through the ad are US and Canada only.

Search campaigns are the ordinary text ads in Google Ads. You choose the searches you want to appear on, write the ads, send people to a page on your website, and pay for each click whether or not that person ever gets in touch. Most businesses can run them, within Google Ads policies.

The first question is not which is better, but whether Google offers Local Services Ads for your type of business in your country at all. Availability varies considerably, so check Google's list before anything else. Where it is available, I recommend running both from day one and testing them side by side, measuring the number of leads, the cost per lead, the proportion of leads that become customers, and the cost of acquiring each customer.

Local Services Ads against Search campaigns

Is your trade on the list?

Local Services Ads run in 11 countries, and each has its own list of categories. These are Google's lists for the UK and Ireland as they stood on 10 October 2026, when this article last checked them. They change, so check Google's UK page or its Irish page before relying on them, and use Google's eligibility checker for your own area.

United Kingdom, 28 home-service categories: Appliance repair, Carpenters, Carpet cleaning, Cleaning, Worktop services, Electricians, Fencing, Flooring, Foundations, Garage doors, General contractors, Handyman, Home inspection, HVAC (heating or air conditioning), Junk removal, Landscaping, Lawn care, Moving, Pest control, Plumbers, Pool cleaning, Pool contracting, Roofers, Snow removal, Tree services, Water damage, Window cleaning, Window repair.

United Kingdom, Greater London only: contract, corporate, criminal, employment, family, immigration, insolvency, IP, litigation, malpractice, personal injury, probate, property, road traffic and tax lawyers, general lawyer services, and estate agents.

Ireland: the same 28 home-service categories, plus siding services. No legal or estate agent categories.

A lot of local businesses aren't on either list: dentists, accountants, driving instructors, locksmiths, security installers. For them the decision is made, and Search is the route. A security installation and maintenance business I work with (CCTV, alarms, access control) is one of them, and Google Ads brings it a consistent 5–15 leads a month at around £55 a lead.

Two more things to know before you sign up in the UK. Google doesn't give lead credits to advertisers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, so you can rate a poor lead but you won't get the money back. And Local Services Ads are moving inside Google Ads, as a Performance Max campaign with a pay-per-lead goal. Google's timetable puts non-US accounts in 2027. It stays keywordless and on Search and Maps only, but setting your own maximum cost per lead goes. If you're weighing Performance Max more generally, my view on when to switch it on is a separate article.

Drawing the area

In a Search campaign you can target UK postcode districts, such as LS1 or M1 (full postcodes, almost never), towns and cities, or a radius of at least 1 km around an address. You can also exclude districts inside that area that you don't cover. If a place is both targeted and excluded, the exclusion wins.

Then change the setting that decides who counts as being in your area. Under Location options, Google's default is Presence or interest: people in, regularly in, or who've shown interest in your targeted locations. Interest is read from things like someone's past searches and the places they've been, so people who live nowhere near you, in another city or another country, can see your ad. For a business serving a few postcodes, choose Presence: people in or regularly in your targeted locations. Google itself suggests Presence when you only want people in specific places.

Two cautions. Location is Google's best estimate from the device, and it says itself that 100% accuracy isn't guaranteed. And a very small area can starve the campaign: Google warns that ads on a tiny radius may show only intermittently or not at all. Set it where you'd actually take a job, then check where your clicks actually came from.

Location targeting set up wrongly is one of the findings I come across again and again when I audit an account. The wasted spend checklist covers the fix in more detail.

Searches worth paying for

Write keywords the way your customers search, not the way your trade talks: “emergency plumber near me”, “boiler repair Leeds”, “electrician Chingford”. Someone typing that has a problem and wants it fixed.

The searches to block come in families. People looking for jobs (“plumber jobs”, “apprentice electrician”, “salary”), for training (“course”, “NVQ”), and for doing it themselves (“how to bleed a radiator”, “DIY”). Google's default is broad match, which reads intent rather than exact words and will keep finding new searches, some of them wrong. Add the wrong ones as negative keywords from the search terms report, and keep them in a shared list so every campaign uses them.

Be careful with one word. Blocking “free” sounds sensible until you notice that “free quote roofer” is someone asking you to quote. Block the free searches that are research, not the ones asking for a price.

Irrelevant searches, with no systematic negative keyword structure behind them, are the biggest offender I find in accounts. On a small local budget, each wasted click is a bigger share of the spend.

Count the phone call

For a trade, the call is the lead. If your Google Ads account only counts form fills, it is optimising towards the minority of customers who fill in forms, and it never learns from the ones who ring.

Google Ads can count calls in two places. Calls from ads come through a Google forwarding number shown in your ad, available in the UK, and count as conversions when they last longer than a minimum length you set (Google's default has been 60 seconds). Calls to a phone number on your website work the same way, with a forwarding number swapped onto your site for people who arrived from an ad. A tap on a phone number isn't a call; it is a tap, and many never connect. The four tracking mistakes most accounts make covers why that matters.

Local Services Ads do this for you, because a call is the thing you pay for.

Run ads when someone can pick up

Google Ads shows your ads all day, every day, unless you tell it otherwise. If nobody answers at 9 pm, the click at 9 pm buys a missed call and a customer who rings the next plumber on the page. Set an ad schedule to the hours someone can answer, and schedule your call asset to business hours as well, so the number only appears when it will be picked up.

On Local Services Ads it matters more. Google ranks those ads partly on responsiveness, and says missed calls may count against you.

What it costs

There is no fixed minimum budget; it depends on what a click costs in your market. £500 buys about 250 clicks at £2 each, or 33 at £15. Local Services Ads work on a weekly budget instead, and Google recommends enough for at least ten leads a week. Whichever you run, give a new account 60–90 days before judging it. What Google Ads costs in the UK works through the arithmetic, and Is Google Ads worth it? covers whether it adds up for your business at all.

Quick answers

If you tried it once and it didn't work

If you tried it once and it cost you, I'll start where I start with everyone: a free 30-minute intro call. If you need more convincing than that, share read-only access to your account before we speak. I'll take a quick look through it first, so the call gives you a transparent read on why it didn't work last time.

If you haven't started yet, what you need in place before you start Google Ads is the place to begin.