Webinar Insights | Google Local Service Ads

Google Local Service Ads ( or LSAs for short) provide excellent opportunities for small, local service-based businesses to advertise their valuable services in Google without the high cost per click (CPC) of standard transactional paid search advertisements. Through a payment model based on leads rather than high per-click costs, LSAs democratize the ad space on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This article informs you of the must-know details about LSAs, including their predicted future trends in the context of an evolving local search landscape.

Where Do LSAs Fit Into the Google Ecosystem?

LSAs provide a far more approachable, simple, and accessible product for small service-based businesses to get started with compared to Google Ads. Without a paid search expert on your team, local businesses owners can quickly become overwhelmed trying to get going with standard paid search ads. This simplicity lies at the heart of where LSAs fit into Google’s paid search ecosystem because local service businesses can easily run efficient paid search campaigns and avoid wasting money.

Returning to the payment model, with traditional Google search ads, you pay for the click regardless of what action people take on your website. 100 people may click on an ad and not one of them calls to enquire about your services. Not only do LSAs provide a fairer payment model based on leads, but it’s also possible to dispute and get refunds for low-quality leads that aren’t valid for your business (in the US and Canada).

LSA New Features and Changes

As Google refines and upgrades its products and the market landscape evolves, some of the following changes have been noticed in Local Service Ads:

The ability to easily add admin or management permissions to your LSA dashboard using just an email address
A more competitive landscape resulting in slightly higher lead costs
Bidding modes — leads were formerly fixed price, however, the introduction of bidding modes lets businesses adjust their budgets and set maximums on the amount they’re willing to pay per lead
Lawyers no longer need to complete background checks to get approval on the platform, which has the upside of removing barriers to entry for small legal firms and the potential downside of opening the door for spammy practices, such as duplicate businesses targeting the same vertical in the same city.
Increased transparency — there has been far more documentation and better communication forthcoming from Google’s side since LSAs first came on the scene. This transparency indicates Google now takes LSAs far more seriously as a core product offering by making setup easier and support teams more knowledgeable and helpful.

LSA Reviews

There are a couple of myths around LSA reviews worth dispelling.

Review Equality: There’s a myth that reviews posted on Google My Business (GMB) profiles are weighted differently from a ranking perspective than reviews written by customers who availed of your service through a Local Service Ad and wrote their reviews there. Reviews are actually weighted the same regardless of where they were posted. However, from a conversion perspective, a competitor business with more verified LSA reviews may have a better chance of converting.
Review Removals: Some local service businesses worry that when they stop advertising on LSA, any Verified LSA reviews left by customers will be completely removed from their business profiles. What actually happens, according to Google’s documentation, is that these reviews are hidden when the business stops advertising on LSA, but they become visible again if the company restarts LSA campaigns.

LSA Golden Nugget Tactics

Don’t restrict your budget too much: While it’s understandable that businesses may want to exercise caution when delving into paid search, a super low budget quickly limits the chances of Google showing your business in local search ads.
Consider related verticals: For highly competitive markets, such as personal injury lawyers, it’s worth trying to think outside the box for related verticals that are relevant to your business. You can also try and get leads from these related verticals. In the personal injury lawyer example, you could add disability lawyer for workers compensation as a category, and there is likely to be far less competition in that more niched, related vertical. Make sure to monitor leads coming from these related verticals and dispute them if they are not valid.
Be mindful about targeting: A common cause of poor performance with LSAs is when businesses try to accommodate all of their markets and services in a single profile. Leverage separate profiles for each business area and market so that you have one profile per major business area.
Change your business name: It’s possible to contact the Google LSA team and ask them to change your business name for different profiles. This is particularly useful for multi-location service businesses because you can append the location to your business name, which a) helps with conversions and b) makes it easier to manage different profiles from within the Manager Accounts dashboard.
Reporting spam smartly: For some competitive verticals in particular areas, spam issues are common in LSA with the same business showing up multiple times for local service ad keywords in a single area. Since Google’s own documentation forbids this, it’s worth reporting these profiles where you see overlapping ads. Try to report spam from a normal Google account unrelated to your own business so you can convey to Google that this spam is off-putting from a customer perspective.

Local Service Ads: Predictions for 2022

There will be some locations for which the ship has sailed in terms of getting cost-effective leads simply because the LSA landscape has become so competitive for those locations. It’s worth thinking about zip codes just outside those crowded locations to stand a better chance.

Google will undoubtedly add more categories into Local Services Ads during 2022 as the company looks to expand the reach of this product to different types of businesses. Expect to see options for categories such as dancing instructors, animal shelters, and yoga studios over the coming 12 months. Getting in early on these new categories (where relevant for your business) can provide great opportunities to rank and get more local leads.

LSAs may start showing up for voice searches because voice search is mentioned in Google’s LSA documentation. This potential change is something to be aware of as more people use voice search to find businesses in their locale.

With Google’s move towards a privacy-first web, businesses that use LSAs as an important part of their online marketing mix stand to benefit from less confusion in relation to the phasing out of third-party cookies and other aspects of this privacy-first web. Local Service Ads do a great job of maintaining privacy for end-users and advertisers by default.

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