Paid search
Buy the jobs you can’t wait to rank for.
SEO takes months. Ads take hours. For emergency work and new service areas that difference is the whole business case.
Ads are the only marketing that works this afternoon
Everything else on this site is an investment that pays back over months. Paid search is the exception: it is a tap. Turn it on and you are visible for the searches you choose within hours, turn it off and you are not.
That makes it the right tool for three situations and the wrong one for most others. It is right when the work is urgent and the customer will not wait for you to rank. It is right when you have opened a new area and have no local history at all. And it is right when there is a specific job you want more of and you would rather buy the volume than wait for it.
It is the wrong tool for a low-value job in a competitive trade, because the click price does not care what your job is worth. That maths is the first thing we do, and it is done before anything is spent.
What we actually do
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Work out whether it pays before it runs.
Click cost, realistic conversion rate and your average job value. If the arithmetic does not work for a service, we say so and put the budget where it does.
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Buy intent, not traffic.
Tight keyword groups, aggressive negatives, and the searches that name a job rather than describe a trade.
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Send the click to a page that answers it.
An ad for emergency work landing on a homepage is money set on fire. Every campaign gets the page it deserves.
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Use the hours and the geography.
Most trades should not be bidding at two in the afternoon in a town they will not drive to.
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Track calls properly.
A call from an ad is the conversion for most trades, so it gets recorded as one, with the search that caused it attached.
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Manage it weekly.
Search terms reviewed, waste cut, budget moved to what converted. Left alone, an account drifts within a month.
Seasonal, reactive, or not at all
A gas engineer’s account should be quiet in July and uncapped in a cold snap. A roofer’s should be built and waiting so it can be switched on the morning a storm is named. A landscaper buys in February for work booked in May. A scaffolder may be better off spending the same money on one trade publication.
Each trade page below has the version for that trade, including the honest answer where the answer is that ads are not the first thing to fix.
The first ninety days
- Weeks 1–4
Arithmetic, structure and landing pages, then a controlled start on the searches with the clearest intent.
- Weeks 5–8
Waste cut from real search-term data, bids and hours shaped to what converted, budget moved off what did not.
- Weeks 9–12
Cost per enquiry settles and is compared against a job’s value, so the spend decision after this is made on numbers.
What good looks like
- You know what an enquiry costs and what one is worth
- Spend concentrates in the hours and towns that convert
- Emergency campaigns are built before the weather needs them
- Search terms are reviewed weekly and the waste list keeps growing
- Ads are switched off for services where the maths does not work
Questions we get asked
What budget do I need? Enough to buy a meaningful number of clicks in your area — often a few hundred a month for a single town. Below that the data is too thin to manage.
Do I pay you or Google? Google directly, so you can see the spend. Our fee is for managing it and it is in the package.
Will it work for my trade? Sometimes not, and the arithmetic says so early. Where it does not, the same budget usually does more in local visibility.
What happens if I stop? The enquiries stop that day. That is the trade-off with a tap, and it is why it runs alongside the slower work rather than instead of it.
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