Last updated: February 12, 2026
You are a dentist. Or a plumber. Or a family lawyer. You are great at what you do, and you know that Google Ads should be bringing in new customers. But right now, it feels like you are pouring money into a black hole. You set up some campaigns last year, maybe hired someone on Fiverr to "optimize" them, and now you are spending $2,000 or $3,000 a month and honestly cannot tell if it is working.
Meanwhile, the big corporate dental chain across town seems to be everywhere on Google. The national plumbing franchise dominates every search. The personal injury firm with the billboard budget is outbidding you on every keyword.
Here is what nobody tells local business owners: you do not need to outspend them. You need to outsmart them. And in 2026, the tools available to local businesses have shifted the playing field in ways that actually favor smaller, more agile operators. The big guys waste enormous amounts of money because they are targeting too broadly. You have an advantage they do not: you know your market, your neighborhood, and your customers better than any corporate marketing department ever will.
This guide covers everything a local business needs to know about Google Ads in 2026. No jargon, no fluff, and no assumption that you have a marketing degree. Just practical strategy for getting your phone to ring more often with the right customers.
Most local businesses think "Google Ads" means one thing. It does not. In 2026, there are several distinct advertising products available to local businesses, and understanding which ones to use (and when) is the difference between wasting money and printing it.
These are the traditional text ads that appear when someone searches for your services. When a homeowner types "emergency plumber near me" or a potential patient searches "dentist accepting new patients," Search ads put you right at the top. You pay per click, typically anywhere from $3 to $9 for most local service categories, though legal and home improvement keywords can run $8 to $60 or more per click depending on your market.
Search ads are the foundation of most local business advertising because they capture people at the moment of intent. Someone searching "family lawyer free consultation" is not casually browsing. They have a problem and they want to solve it today. That is the most valuable type of traffic you can buy.
Local Service Ads are fundamentally different from Search ads, and many local businesses do not understand the distinction. LSAs appear above everything else on the search results page, including regular Search ads. They show your business name, star rating, hours, and a click-to-call button. Most importantly, you pay per lead, not per click. That means you only pay when someone actually contacts your business through the ad, whether by phone call or message.
In October 2025, Google replaced its previous "Google Guaranteed," "Google Screened," and "License Verified" badges with a single unified "Google Verified" blue checkmark. The money-back guarantee that was previously associated with the Google Guaranteed badge was also discontinued. The verification requirements remain the same: background checks, license verification, and insurance documentation. However, the badge now appears somewhat inconsistently in search results, which has changed the competitive dynamics slightly.
LSA costs vary significantly by industry and market. Based on current data across major markets, here is what you can expect to pay per lead: HVAC leads typically run $45 to $85 each. Plumbing leads range from $40 to $75. Electrical leads cost $35 to $70. Roofing leads run higher at $50 to $95. Painting and landscaping leads are more affordable at $30 to $40. Legal leads vary wildly, from $45 for estate planning to $249 for personal injury cases. Dental leads tend to fall in the $114 to $171 range per lead.
One crucial development: as of July 2025, all customer reviews for businesses using Local Service Ads are now managed through your Google Business Profile rather than your LSA account. This means your Google Business Profile reviews and your LSA reviews are the same thing, which simplifies review management but also means your overall review profile directly impacts your LSA performance.
This is the big story for 2026 that most local businesses have not caught up with yet. Google has dramatically increased the number of ads appearing in the local pack (the map results that show up when someone searches for a nearby business). Data from local search tracking platforms shows that local pack ads now appear on roughly 22% of tracked local keywords, up from less than 3% in November 2025. That is a 733% increase in just three months, and the trend is still accelerating.
What this means for your business: if you are not running ads that appear in the local pack and Maps results, you are increasingly invisible for local searches. Google is monetizing local search more aggressively than ever before, and businesses without advertising budgets face reduced prominence in local results. This is not optional anymore for most local businesses.
For most local businesses, the phone call is the conversion. You do not need someone to fill out a form or add something to a cart. You need the phone to ring. Call extensions add your phone number directly to your Search ads, making it one tap from search to call on mobile. Call-only ads go further by making the entire ad a call button, which is ideal for emergency services like plumbing, HVAC, and locksmith.
Given that over 76% of "near me" searches happen on mobile devices, and that 78% of people who search for local services on mobile call within 24 hours, call extensions are not optional for local businesses. They should be on every single campaign you run.
Let us be direct about something. A $1,000 per month Google Ads budget is tight. It is workable, but there is very little room for error. A $3,000 to $5,000 monthly budget gives you real room to compete in most local markets. Here is how to allocate either level strategically.
At this budget level, you need to be ruthlessly focused. Do not try to run five campaign types across every keyword you can think of. That is how you end up spending $30 a day across too many keywords and not getting enough data on any of them to optimize properly.
Start with one campaign type. For most local businesses, that means either Local Service Ads or a tightly focused Search campaign, not both simultaneously at this budget. If your industry qualifies for LSAs (and most local service businesses do in 2026), start there. The pay-per-lead model means you are not burning money on clicks that do not convert. Once LSAs are generating consistent leads, you can evaluate whether adding Search campaigns would bring incremental volume or just cannibalize your LSA traffic.
If you go the Search campaign route, limit yourself to 10 to 15 high-intent keywords maximum. These should be your money keywords: the searches that indicate someone is ready to buy, not just researching. "Emergency plumber [your city]" is a money keyword. "How to fix a leaky faucet" is not. Focus your entire budget on the searches that generate calls, not traffic.
At $1,000 to $2,000 per month, every wasted dollar hurts. This is where negative keywords become critical. You need to be reviewing your search terms report at least weekly (daily is better) and adding negatives for irrelevant queries. Common waste categories include informational searches ("how to," "DIY," "what is"), job-seeking searches ("salary," "hiring," "jobs"), free-seeking searches ("free," "cheap," "pro bono"), and competitor name searches that pull in people looking for a specific business, not your category.
This budget range opens up a multi-channel strategy. The optimal allocation for most local businesses at this level breaks down roughly as follows: 60% toward your highest-performing lead source (usually LSAs or Search campaigns depending on your industry), 25% toward your second channel to capture additional demand, and 15% toward testing and expansion such as Performance Max, Maps ads, or targeting adjacent service areas.
The most successful local advertisers we see at this budget level typically run Local Service Ads as their primary lead source and supplement with Search campaigns targeting keywords that LSAs do not cover well, such as branded terms, specific service variations, or longer-tail queries. They also ensure their Google Business Profile is fully optimized since it now directly powers both LSA performance and Maps ad visibility.
At this budget, you should also be running call tracking. If you are spending $3,000 or more per month on ads and you do not know which campaigns are generating phone calls, you are flying blind. Google's built-in call tracking provides basic data, but a dedicated call tracking solution gives you recording, attribution, and the ability to distinguish between a five-second hang-up and a 12-minute call that books an appointment.
Geographic targeting is where local businesses waste the most money, and it is also the easiest thing to fix. Here are the mistakes we see constantly.
A dentist in a suburb of Dallas does not need to target all of Dallas-Fort Worth. Their patients come from a 10 to 15 mile radius. A plumber in Brooklyn does not need to target all five boroughs. By default, Google often suggests broader targeting than local businesses actually need, and many advertisers accept the default without thinking about it.
The fix is simple: look at where your actual customers come from. If 90% of your patients live within 8 miles of your office, target an 8-mile radius. You can always expand later if you have budget to spare, but starting tight ensures your limited budget is reaching the people most likely to actually walk through your door.
The opposite mistake is less common but equally damaging. Some businesses target only their immediate neighborhood and miss the adjacent areas where potential customers are actively searching. A family law firm in Scottsdale that only targets Scottsdale is missing potential clients in Paradise Valley, Tempe, and parts of north Phoenix who would happily drive 15 minutes for the right attorney.
The key is matching your targeting to your actual service area, not your zip code.
This is one of the most common and most expensive targeting mistakes in local Google Ads. By default, Google targets people who are "in, regularly in, or who've shown interest in" your target location. That means someone in New York who recently searched for "things to do in Miami" might see your Miami plumbing ad. That is not useful.
For local businesses, you should almost always set your location targeting to "Presence only: People in or regularly in your targeted locations." This ensures your ads only show to people who are physically in your service area, not tourists, researchers, or people who happen to be interested in your city for unrelated reasons.
Within your service area, not all locations are equally valuable. A home services company might find that leads from wealthier neighborhoods have a higher average job value. A restaurant might find that searches from the business district convert better during lunch hours. Location bid adjustments let you increase your bids for high-value areas and decrease them for lower-performing ones, ensuring your budget goes where it generates the most revenue.
This is one of the most common questions local businesses ask, and the answer depends on your industry, your market, and your budget. Here is a straightforward framework.
You are in a service industry that Google supports for LSAs (home services, legal, dental, financial services, real estate, and others). You want to pay only for actual leads rather than clicks. You have a strong review profile (4.5 stars or higher with at least 20 to 30 reviews). You want to appear at the very top of search results above traditional ads. You provide services that generate emergency or immediate-need searches.
LSAs are particularly powerful for home services businesses. The pay-per-lead model means a plumber spending $2,000 per month on LSAs knows exactly how many leads they are getting and exactly what each one costs. There is no guesswork about click-to-call conversion rates or landing page performance. If the phone rings, you pay. If it does not, you do not.
You want to target specific keywords that LSAs do not cover well. You want to control your ad copy and messaging (LSAs use a standardized format). You want to drive traffic to specific landing pages for different services. You are in an industry or location where LSAs are not yet available. You want to run remarketing campaigns to people who visited your site but did not convert.
Search ads give you significantly more control over targeting, messaging, and the customer journey. For a law firm that wants separate landing pages for family law, estate planning, and personal injury, Search ads allow you to send each search to the most relevant page. LSAs send all traffic to a single profile.
For local businesses with sufficient budget ($2,500 per month or more), running both LSAs and Search campaigns is usually the optimal strategy. LSAs capture the highest-intent, ready-to-call traffic at the top of the page. Search ads capture searches that LSAs miss, let you control messaging for specific services, and give you remarketing capabilities. Data from agencies managing both channels for local businesses shows a typical 60/40 budget split favoring LSAs, with Search campaigns picking up the incremental volume.
Theory is useful, but let us get specific. Here is how Google Ads plays out across four of the most common local business verticals.
The average cost per click for dental keywords is $7.85, making it one of the more expensive local verticals. "Dentist near me" and "emergency dentist" are the highest-volume keywords, but they are also the most competitive. The smarter play is to target specific services: "dental implants [city]," "wisdom tooth extraction [city]," "Invisalign provider near me." These keywords have lower competition and higher average patient value.
For dental practices, Google Local Service Ads are a must. Dental LSAs cost roughly $114 to $171 per lead depending on your market, which sounds expensive until you consider that a new dental patient has an average lifetime value of $10,000 to $15,000 over their relationship with your practice. That is an extraordinary return on a $150 lead even if only one in four leads converts to a patient.
The biggest mistake dental practices make is not tracking which campaigns generate actual appointments versus tire-kicker calls. A call tracking solution that integrates with your practice management software lets you see exactly which keywords and campaigns are putting patients in chairs, not just making the phone ring.
Google Business Profile optimization is critical for dental practices because it directly impacts both your organic Maps visibility and your LSA ranking. Make sure your profile includes all services you offer, current photos of your office, accurate hours, and a steady stream of recent reviews. The dental practices that dominate local search in 2026 are the ones with 100 or more reviews averaging 4.8 stars or higher.
Legal is the most expensive local vertical on Google Ads, period. Personal injury keywords can cost $8.58 per click on average, with some high-value keywords like "mesothelioma lawyer" or "truck accident attorney" reaching well over $100 per click. But not all legal verticals are equally competitive. Estate planning, family law, and immigration law keywords are significantly more affordable, typically in the $4 to $8 per click range.
For law firms, the key strategy is segmenting your campaigns by practice area and understanding the dramatically different economics of each. A personal injury firm might pay $249 per lead through LSAs, but a single successful case can generate $100,000 or more in fees. That math works. An estate planning attorney paying $45 per LSA lead who converts one in five to a $3,000 engagement also wins.
The geographic targeting advice is especially important for lawyers. Most people will drive further for a specialist attorney than for a general practitioner. A criminal defense lawyer in a mid-sized city can realistically target a 30 to 50 mile radius. An immigration attorney might target an entire metropolitan area. Match your targeting to how far your actual clients travel, not some arbitrary radius.
Law firms also benefit heavily from running separate campaigns for different practice areas with dedicated landing pages for each. Someone searching "child custody lawyer" and someone searching "DUI attorney" have completely different problems and need completely different messaging. Sending both to your firm's generic homepage is one of the most common and most costly mistakes local law firms make.
Home services is where Local Service Ads have had the most transformative impact. The pay-per-lead model is a natural fit for an industry where the phone call is everything. A plumber paying $40 to $75 per LSA lead who closes 40% of those leads on jobs averaging $350 is looking at a cost of acquisition around $100 to $188 per customer. For a roofing company where the average job is $8,000 to $15,000, even a $95 lead that converts one time in five is incredibly profitable.
The seasonal dynamics of home services require a flexible budget strategy. HVAC companies should increase budgets dramatically in the peak of summer (AC repair) and winter (heating emergencies) when demand and CPCs spike simultaneously. A smart approach is to set baseline budgets for shoulder seasons and increase them by 50% to 100% during peak months. Plumbing tends to be more consistent year-round, though spring thaw and major storms create demand spikes.
For home services, response time is everything. Data shows that businesses responding to leads within 30 seconds have a booking rate three times higher than those that take more than five minutes. If you are spending money on Google Ads for your plumbing or HVAC business and not answering the phone within the first ring or two, you are wasting most of your ad spend. Set up call forwarding, automated SMS responses, and whatever infrastructure you need to ensure every lead gets a fast response.
The negative keyword game is especially important for home services. "How to fix a leaky faucet" clicks on your plumbing ad cost you $7 and never convert. "DIY water heater installation" is not your customer. You need to aggressively exclude informational and DIY queries to keep your budget focused on people who want to hire a professional, not become one.
Real estate Google Ads occupy a unique position because the customer journey is longer and the conversion is more complex than other local verticals. Someone searching "homes for sale in [neighborhood]" might not be ready to engage an agent for weeks or months. This makes lead nurturing and remarketing more important for real estate than for emergency-driven verticals like plumbing or HVAC.
For real estate agents, the most effective Google Ads strategy focuses on hyper-local, high-intent keywords: "[specific neighborhood] homes for sale," "houses under [price] in [area]," "open houses this weekend [city]." These long-tail keywords are cheaper than broad terms and attract people who are further along in their buying journey.
Real estate agents should also consider that Google Local Service Ads now support real estate in many markets. LSA leads for real estate tend to be high quality because the person had to actively click to contact you, but the longer sales cycle means you need to evaluate ROI over months, not days. Track your LSA leads through to closed transactions, not just initial contact.
The biggest waste of money for real estate agents on Google Ads is targeting overly broad geographic areas with generic keywords. "Homes for sale" targeting your entire metropolitan area will drain your budget fast and generate mostly low-quality leads. Narrow your targeting to specific neighborhoods or zip codes where you have listings and local expertise, and let your ad copy reflect that specificity.
Here is an uncomfortable truth that the digital marketing industry does not want you to hear. If you are a local business spending $2,000 to $3,000 per month on Google Ads, hiring a traditional agency to manage those campaigns rarely makes economic sense.
A typical PPC management agency charges 15% to 20% of ad spend, or a flat fee ranging from $500 to $1,500 per month. Many charge a minimum of $1,000 to $1,500 per month regardless of your ad spend. If you are spending $2,000 per month on ads and paying an agency $1,500 per month to manage them, 43% of your total marketing investment is going to management fees rather than actual advertising. That is before the agency makes a single optimization.
The economics get worse when you look at what that management fee actually buys. Most agencies assign your account to a junior analyst who checks in once or twice a week, reviews the search terms report, makes a few bid adjustments, and files a monthly report. For a local account spending $2,000 per month, your agency might spend two to three hours per month on active management. That means you are paying $500 to $750 per hour for their time, even if the individual managing your account earns $25 per hour.
This is not to say agencies provide no value. A good agency brings expertise, strategic thinking, and experience across multiple accounts. For businesses spending $10,000 or more per month on ads, the agency model can work well because the management fee represents a smaller percentage of total spend and the account complexity justifies professional management.
But for the vast majority of local businesses spending $1,000 to $5,000 per month, the agency model is structurally broken. You are either overpaying for basic management, or you are getting too little attention to justify the cost.
Many local businesses turn to freelancers as a more affordable option, typically paying $300 to $800 per month for Google Ads management. This can work better economically, but it introduces reliability and quality risks. Freelancers get busy, take on too many clients, go on vacation, or simply disappear. When your Google Ads are not being actively managed for a week or two, performance degrades, budgets are wasted on irrelevant searches, and opportunities are missed.
The fundamental problem with both agencies and freelancers is the same: your campaigns only get optimized when a human being decides to sit down and work on them. For the other 95% or more of the time, your campaigns are running on autopilot, and Google's autopilot is optimized for Google's revenue, not yours.
If there is one piece of advice in this entire article that will have the most immediate impact on your advertising results, it is this: set up proper call tracking before you spend another dollar on Google Ads.
For local businesses, the phone call is the primary conversion. Yet an alarming number of local businesses running Google Ads have no idea which campaigns, keywords, or ads are generating their phone calls. They look at clicks in Google Ads, they look at total call volume, and they try to guess whether the two are related. This is like a restaurant guessing how many customers came from their newspaper ad versus their highway billboard versus their Yelp page. You cannot optimize what you cannot measure.
Google offers built-in call tracking through call extensions and call reporting, which assigns a Google forwarding number to your ads and tracks when calls come from ad clicks. This provides basic data about call volume, call duration, and which campaigns generated calls. For many small local businesses, this is sufficient to get started.
For more sophisticated tracking, third-party solutions provide call recording, caller demographics, multi-touch attribution, and integration with your CRM or practice management software. This lets you trace the path from a search query to a phone call to a booked appointment to a completed service, giving you true return on ad spend data rather than just "we got some calls."
The most important metrics for local businesses are cost per lead (how much you spent to generate each phone call or form submission), cost per acquisition (how much you spent for each lead that converted to a paying customer), and customer lifetime value relative to acquisition cost. If you know that a new dental patient costs you $180 to acquire through Google Ads and generates $12,000 in revenue over their lifetime with your practice, you have a clear, confident basis for scaling your ad spend.
Let us step back and look at the bigger picture of what we have covered. To run Google Ads effectively as a local business in 2026, you need to understand Search campaigns, Local Service Ads, Maps ads, call extensions, geographic targeting with location bid adjustments, negative keyword management, call tracking and attribution, seasonal budget adjustments, landing page optimization, Quality Score management, conversion tracking setup including enhanced conversions, review generation and management, Google Business Profile optimization, and competitive monitoring.
That is an enormous amount of knowledge and ongoing work for someone whose actual job is fixing teeth, representing clients, repairing furnaces, or selling houses.
The traditional answer to this problem has been "hire an agency." As we covered above, for most local businesses the agency model is economically questionable. The next most common answer is "learn it yourself," which means spending 5 to 10 hours per week on Google Ads management when you should be spending that time on your actual business.
There is a third answer that is increasingly relevant in 2026: let autonomous AI handle it.
groas was built specifically for this scenario. Instead of surfacing recommendations for you to review and approve (which still requires you to understand what you are looking at), groas operates your Google Ads campaigns autonomously. It monitors search terms and adds negatives in real time, adjusts bids based on live auction data, manages budget allocation across campaigns, tracks conversion patterns and optimizes toward actual business outcomes, and does all of this continuously without requiring you to log in, review dashboards, or make decisions about bid strategies.
At $79 per month, groas costs a fraction of what a PPC agency charges for management. For a dentist spending $3,000 per month on Google Ads, groas represents less than 3% of total ad spend devoted to management, compared to the 25% to 50% an agency would charge. And unlike an agency that checks in on your account once or twice a week, groas is monitoring and optimizing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The pitch is simple: you became a dentist to do dentistry, a lawyer to practice law, a plumber to fix pipes. You did not sign up to become a Google Ads expert. You should not need to understand the difference between Maximize Conversions and Target CPA bidding. You should not need to spend your evenings reviewing search terms reports. You should not need to worry about whether your agency's junior analyst remembered to check your campaigns this week.
You should be able to plug your Google Ads into a system that optimizes them as well as or better than a human expert, at a cost that makes sense for your budget, and then go back to running your business. That is what autonomous AI management delivers.
A few important developments are reshaping local advertising on Google right now, and local businesses need to be aware of them.
As mentioned earlier, Google consolidated its trust badges into a single "Google Verified" blue checkmark in October 2025. The previous Google Guaranteed program's money-back guarantee has been discontinued. This means the badge is now purely a trust signal rather than a financial guarantee, which changes the competitive dynamic somewhat. Businesses that previously relied on the Google Guaranteed badge as a key differentiator now need to focus more on reviews, responsiveness, and profile completeness to stand out.
Google is pushing AI Max adoption aggressively, and it is likely to become the default recommendation for Search campaigns in 2026. AI Max uses AI to dynamically generate keywords, ad copy, and even select landing pages based on your business details and campaign goals. For local businesses, this is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it can reduce the complexity of campaign setup. On the other hand, it gives you less control over targeting and messaging, and there are legitimate concerns about AI-generated ad copy misrepresenting your brand.
Local businesses should approach AI Max cautiously and test it against manual campaigns before going all-in. groas integrates with Google's AI features including AI Max at a deep level, which means it can leverage the benefits of Google's AI while maintaining the guardrails and strategic oversight that prevent budget waste.
The 733% increase in local pack advertising that we discussed earlier is perhaps the most important development for local businesses in 2026. As Google continues monetizing local search results, organic-only strategies become less viable. Local businesses that are not running paid campaigns will find themselves increasingly invisible in the search results that matter most for driving foot traffic and phone calls.
With LSA reviews fully managed through Google Business Profile as of July 2025, your review strategy and your advertising strategy are now inseparable. A strong review profile (100 or more reviews, 4.8 stars or higher) directly improves your LSA ranking, your Maps visibility, and the click-through rate on your Search ads. Investing in a systematic review generation process is not just good customer service. It is a direct investment in your advertising performance.
For most local businesses, a minimum of $1,000 per month in ad spend is needed to generate meaningful data and results. The sweet spot for most small local businesses is $2,000 to $5,000 per month, which provides enough budget to run multiple campaign types, test different approaches, and generate a consistent flow of leads. Businesses in highly competitive verticals like personal injury law or HVAC in major metro areas may need $5,000 to $10,000 or more to compete effectively. The right budget depends on your industry, your market, and the lifetime value of a new customer.
Yes, for most local service businesses, LSAs provide the best return on investment of any Google advertising product. The pay-per-lead model eliminates the risk of paying for clicks that do not convert, and LSAs appear above all other search results, giving you maximum visibility. The key success factors are maintaining a strong review profile (4.5 stars or higher), responding to leads quickly (within 30 seconds ideally), and keeping your Google Business Profile accurate and complete. Industries that benefit most from LSAs include home services, legal, dental, financial services, and real estate.
Ask your agency three questions: how many leads did my campaigns generate last month, what was the cost per lead, and how does that compare to the previous month? If your agency cannot answer these questions clearly, they are not managing your campaigns effectively. You should also have access to your own Google Ads account (not the agency's account) and be able to see the change history showing what optimizations are being made and how frequently. If you see long gaps between changes, your account is not getting the attention you are paying for.
Google Ads (Search campaigns) charge you per click, give you full control over keywords, ad copy, and landing pages, and appear below LSAs in search results. Local Service Ads charge you per lead, use a standardized ad format based on your Google Business Profile, and appear at the very top of search results with a Google Verified badge. Search ads are more flexible and customizable, while LSAs are simpler to manage and carry lower financial risk since you only pay for actual leads. Most local businesses benefit from running both.
The most common reasons are: your geographic targeting is too broad, so you are paying for clicks from people outside your service area. Your keywords are too generic, attracting informational searches rather than people ready to hire. Your ad copy does not include a compelling call to action or your phone number. Your landing page is slow, confusing, or not mobile-friendly. You are not running call extensions or call-only ads. Or your conversion tracking is broken, and you are actually getting calls but not attributing them to your ads. Start by checking your search terms report for irrelevant queries, verify your location targeting is set to "Presence only," and ensure your landing page loads in under 3 seconds on mobile.
Focus on specificity. Large businesses target broad keywords across wide geographic areas, which means they waste enormous amounts of money on irrelevant traffic. As a local business, you can target exactly the neighborhoods you serve, use specific long-tail keywords that reflect your niche expertise, write ad copy that speaks directly to your local community, and optimize your landing pages for the exact services and areas you cover. A dental practice targeting "dental implants [specific suburb]" will pay less per click and convert at a higher rate than a corporate dental chain targeting "dentist" across an entire metropolitan area. Your advantage is precision, not budget.
If your monthly ad spend is under $2,000, hiring a traditional agency rarely makes economic sense because management fees can equal 50% or more of your ad spend. Self-management is an option if you are willing to invest 5 to 10 hours per week learning and optimizing, but most local business owners simply do not have that time. Autonomous AI solutions like groas offer a third option: expert-level optimization at a fraction of agency costs ($79 per month versus $1,000 to $1,500 per month), without requiring you to learn Google Ads or spend time managing campaigns yourself. For local businesses spending $1,000 to $10,000 per month on ads, this increasingly represents the best value.
Focus on high-intent, service-specific, location-modified keywords. For a plumber: "emergency plumber [city]," "water heater repair [neighborhood]," "licensed plumber near me." For a dentist: "dentist accepting new patients [city]," "emergency dental care [area]," "dental implants [city]." For a lawyer: "[practice area] attorney [city]," "free consultation [practice area] lawyer [area]." Avoid broad informational keywords ("how to fix a toilet," "dental care tips," "what is probate") that attract researchers rather than buyers. Use negative keywords aggressively to block irrelevant traffic.
In 2026, Google reviews are directly tied to your advertising performance in multiple ways. Your review count and rating affect your Local Service Ads ranking (businesses with 50 or more reviews averaging 4.7 stars or higher significantly outrank competitors). Your reviews appear in your Search ads through seller ratings extensions, influencing click-through rate. Your Google Business Profile reviews power your Maps ads visibility. And since July 2025, LSA reviews and Google Business Profile reviews are unified, meaning your review strategy affects all your advertising channels simultaneously. Aim for at least 5 to 10 new reviews per month and respond to every review within 24 hours.
The Google Verified badge is a blue checkmark that appears on Local Service Ads for businesses that have passed Google's screening process, including background checks, license verification, and insurance documentation. It replaced the previous Google Guaranteed, Google Screened, and License Verified badges in October 2025. If you want to run Local Service Ads, you need to complete the verification process. The badge builds trust with potential customers, though it now appears somewhat inconsistently in search results. The verification process typically takes 2 to 4 weeks and requires current licensing, insurance meeting Google's minimums (typically $1 million in general liability), and background checks for the business owner and any customer-facing employees.
