Pull out your phone and search your own trade. "Electrician near me." Watch what loads first. Before the map pins, before the regular ads with the little "Ad" tag, there's a row of names with a green checkmark, a star rating, and a call button sitting right there. That row is the top of the page.
Most homeowners don't scroll past it. They tap a name, or they hit call straight from that row, and they start working down the list. First guy who picks up and sounds like he knows the job usually gets it. You know that's true, because that's how half your own customers found you.
Google Local Services Ads (LSAs, for short) are how you get into that row. You pass a license and insurance check, you earn the green badge, and then you pay for leads instead of clicks. Clean idea. The money part is where trades get burned, so let's walk it straight.
What the green checkmark actually is
The badge comes from passing Google's screening. You hand over your license, your insurance, and you clear a background check on the business. Once you're through, the green checkmark shows up next to your name and you're eligible to sit above the regular paid results.
For home trades the badge is called Google Guaranteed. (You'll see "Google Screened" used for some other fields like lawyers and accountants. Same green checkmark, different name.) The Guaranteed part means if a customer books you through the ad and isn't happy, Google may refund what they paid, up to a cap Google sets. That's Google's backstop to make homeowners comfortable tapping a name they've never heard of. It isn't a free pass on sloppy work, so don't treat it like one.
Here's what the screening usually asks for:
- Your trade license, current and matching the services you list.
- Proof of insurance, general liability at the limits Google wants.
- A background check on the owner and sometimes the business.
- Reviews tied to your Google Business Profile, because your star rating shows right in the ad.
None of it is hard if your paperwork's in order. It just takes a week or two, so start before you need the leads, not the Monday you're staring at an empty schedule.
You pay per lead, not per click
This is the real difference, and it's a good one for trades. Regular Google ads charge you every time somebody clicks, tire-kicker or not. You can burn a hundred bucks on clicks that never once dialed the phone.
LSAs charge you per lead. A lead is a real call or message from someone in your area asking about work you actually do. You set a weekly budget, Google feeds you leads up to it, and you get charged when one lands. What a lead costs depends on your trade and your town, so figure anywhere from a dozen bucks to north of fifty each, and watch your own numbers instead of trusting a guess.
The catch is right there in the pricing. You pay when the lead comes in, whether or not it turns into a job. Which brings up the part nobody at Google is going to chase you about.
Dispute the junk. You shouldn't pay for garbage.
Not every lead is real work. Somebody fat-fingers your number. A telemarketer gets through. A guy two towns past your area calls for a job you don't drive to. A homeowner wants a service you don't even offer. You got charged for every one of those the second it came in.
You can dispute them. Google lets you flag a lead and ask for a credit, and when it's clearly junk you usually get it back. The ones worth flagging:
- Wrong number or an obvious misdial.
- Spam or a sales pitch, not a customer.
- Out of your service area, somewhere you flat-out don't go.
- A service you don't provide, like a drain call to a guy who only does panels.
- A duplicate, the same person hitting you twice.
Two honest warnings. You won't win every dispute, and a real customer who just didn't book you is not a junk lead, so don't waste your time flagging those. And there's a time window, which means you have to review your leads every few days instead of letting a month pile up. Ten minutes on a Friday clawing back three bad leads is real money over a year.
A lead you let sit an hour is money you already spent
Say that one twice. The second a lead comes in, you've paid for it. If you let it ring out and call back after the job, you didn't save the money, you spent it and got nothing. That's the most expensive way to run LSAs there is.
Remember how homeowners use that row at the top. They don't tap one name and wait. They tap yours, and if you don't pick up in a ring or two, they tap the next two and start talking to whoever answers. You already bought the lead. Then you hand the actual job to a competitor because you were up a ladder with both hands full.
Nobody can answer the phone with their hands in a panel. But you can make sure nobody who contacts you hears dead silence.
Set up a same-minute auto-response
The fix is a text that fires the instant a call or message comes in, before the homeowner moves on. A missed LSA call gets an immediate reply. A message gets answered or booked on the spot. Something like:
"Thanks for calling [Your Company]. We're on a job and can't grab the phone this second. Reply here with your address and what's going on and we'll get you a time today. No heat or active leak? Text URGENT and we'll call you right back."
That one text does three things. It beats the two guys the homeowner was about to call. It sorts the real emergency from the can-wait. And it lets you answer from the truck between jobs instead of losing the lead to voicemail. Tie it to a simple booking link and some of them schedule themselves while you're still finishing up.
Worth doing this week
You don't need to boil the ocean. A few moves get you most of the way:
- Start your LSA application. Get the license and insurance docs uploaded so the week-or-two screening clock starts now.
- Set a weekly budget you'd actually spend, and tighten your service area to the towns you really drive to. Fewer out-of-area leads to dispute later.
- Put 10 minutes on the calendar every Friday to review leads and dispute the junk. Treat it like reconciling a receipt, because that's what it is.
- Turn on a same-minute auto-response for missed calls and messages, with a line that catches true emergencies.
- Ask your last handful of happy customers for a Google review. Your star rating sits right in the ad, and it's the difference between the tap and the scroll.
Getting the badge is the easy half. Answering fast and refusing to pay for garbage is what makes it pay. If you want a hand wiring up the auto-response and booking link so every LSA lead gets caught the second it lands, that's the kind of thing we set up for Mass trades at Mass AI Agency. Either way, don't let a lead you already paid for go dial the next guy.