Urgent and emergency services
Plumbing, roofing after a storm, locksmiths, auto repair. The search is the moment of need, and whoever appears gets the call.
Google Ads
Someone searches for your service tonight. Right now a competitor is the result they tap.
Google Ads reaches people at the moment they are looking. That makes it the most direct channel available to a local business — and the easiest to waste money on, because a campaign that is not tracking conversions is just buying clicks.
§01 Who this is for
When Google Ads is the right channel
Established, well-understood services
Cleaning, landscaping, accounting, legal. People already know these exist and search for them by name.
High-consideration local purchases
Someone researching a contractor for a kitchen remodel searches, compares and reads. You want to be in that comparison.
Businesses with a page worth landing on
Search advertising buys attention. What happens in the ten seconds after the click is the landing page’s job.
And when it is not
If nobody is searching for what you sell yet — a new treatment, an unfamiliar offer — search cannot help, because there is no existing demand to capture. That is a Meta Ads problem, and I will say so rather than spend your budget finding out.
§02 What’s included
The work itself
- Account and campaign structure built from your services, not a generic template
- Keyword research, match types, and a negative keyword list from day one
- Search campaigns written around what people actually type
- Conversion tracking for calls and form submissions, verified before spend starts
- Landing-page alignment so the click lands on a page about what was searched
- Geographic targeting set to the area you actually serve, and exclusions for the areas you do not
- Ad scheduling matched to when enquiries actually arrive and get answered
- Call extensions, so urgent customers can ring you straight from the ad
- Ongoing optimisation: search terms, negative keywords, bids, budget, ad copy
- Plain-English reporting on what was spent and what came back
§03 How it runs
From first call to live
- 01
Account review
What exists, what it has cost, and whether conversions were ever tracked correctly.
- 02
Structure and tracking
Campaigns, keywords and conversion tracking set up and tested before spend begins.
- 03
Launch small
Start at a controlled budget, confirm the data is real, then scale what works.
- 04
Manage and report
Ongoing optimisation with reporting you can actually read.
§04 Related work
Where this has been built
§05 Further reading
Before you spend anything
Advertising · 9 min read
How Google Ads actually works for a service business
Not the interface tour — the four things that decide whether a local service campaign makes money, and the mistakes that quietly drain the budget.
Read it Advertising · 7 min readGoogle Ads or Meta Ads for a local business?
The difference is not budget or audience size. It is whether people already know they need what you sell — which decides the channel before anything else does.
Read it Advertising · 6 min readWhy running ads before fixing the landing page wastes money
Advertising buys attention. The page decides what that attention is worth — which is why fixing the page first is an order of operations, not a preference.
Read it Start here
Tell me what you are trying to sell
The first conversation is free and there is no obligation at the end of it. I reply within one business day.
Other services
Web Design & Development
Custom business websites, redesigns and landing pages — designed around how your customers actually decide.
What this involvesMeta Ads
Facebook and Instagram advertising for demand you have to create rather than capture — audiences, creative and tracking handled together.
What this involves