Calls this week, while the SEO matures.

Both, in that order of urgency. Ads produce calls in days but stop the moment you stop paying. SEO takes months and then keeps producing. Running ads while the organic work matures is how you avoid a quiet six months, and most clients reduce ad spend once the map pack and city pages are carrying their weight.

Local Services Ads sit above the normal search ads and carry the Google Guaranteed badge. They are billed per lead rather than per click, and for most home service trades they outperform standard search ads. They need licence and insurance verification, which we handle as part of the setup.

Because the account is usually matching searches nobody intended to pay for — "how to fix" queries, job seekers, wholesale suppliers, other contractors researching prices. Negative keyword lists are tedious and unglamorous, so they get built once at launch and never touched. Reviewing them weekly is the single highest-return habit in a paid account.

It is a fair question, and the distinction matters. A lead broker sells the same homeowner to several contractors and owns the relationship. Google Ads buys a click that lands on your site, produces a call to your line, and is measured against your revenue. You are renting attention, not buying a shared name — and it sits alongside the organic layers rather than replacing them.

We verify it rather than trust the dashboard. A very common failure is that the tag appears to fire while the conversion request is actually blocked by the site’s own security policy, which shows up in Google Ads as "Misconfigured" and silently ruins optimisation. We confirm the conversion request returns a success before we call it live.