Contractors ask me all the time whether they should do SEO or run ads.
Wrong question. They are two different tools and they do two different jobs. Asking which one is better is like asking whether a torque wrench beats a grinder. Depends on what is in front of you.
Here is how I actually explain it on a call.
Paid ads are a faucet
You turn it on, water comes out. You turn it off, it stops. Same day, both directions.
You are paying for placement. With Google Local Services Ads you pay per lead and you carry the Google Guaranteed badge. With Search you pay per click. Either way, the meter runs the whole time the faucet is open.
What you get: speed, and a number you can read. Cost per lead this week versus last week. You know exactly what a booked job costs you, and you can turn the volume up on a slow Tuesday.
What you do not get: anything that keeps working after you stop paying. The day the card gets declined, the phone goes quiet.
SEO is a well
You dig it once. It takes a while. Then it produces without a meter running.
For a trades business, most of this is your Google Business Profile and your website. Google says local ranking comes down to three things: relevance, distance, and prominence. How well you match the search, how close you are to the person searching, and how well known you are.
You cannot move your shop. You can absolutely move the other two.
What you get: leads that cost less every year you keep at it. Somebody searching "AC repair near me" at 2am found you on their own. That is a different homeowner than the one who clicked an ad, and they usually show up warmer.
What you do not get: speed. And I am not going to give you a month count. Google does not publish one. Anybody who tells you "90 days" is making it up.
Which one is actually you
Start with ads if:
- You need calls this month, not next year
- You are new, or you just opened a new service area
- Your profile is thin. Few reviews, no photos, nothing to rank yet
- You have trucks sitting idle and payroll on Friday
Start with SEO if:
- You already have a review base and years in the market
- Your ad costs keep climbing and the math is getting worse
- You cannot fund a real ad budget month after month
- You are playing a 5 year game, not a 90 day one
The part most shops miss
If your Google profile is a mess and your website does not say what city you are in, ads will not save you.
The homeowner clicks, looks you up, finds nothing, and calls the next guy. You just paid for a lead you had no chance of closing. That is not an ad problem. That is a foundation problem, and no budget fixes it.
Fix the foundation. Then buy the traffic.
Foundation means the boring stuff: correct categories and service list on your Google Business Profile, real photos of your crew and your work, a steady flow of reviews, and a website that names your city and your services in plain language.
Most shops need both
Ads keep the lights on while the well gets dug.
You run Local Services Ads to fill the schedule this month. At the same time, you are stacking reviews, publishing real service and city pages, and getting your profile in order. Twelve months later your cost per booked job is down, because a chunk of your calls stopped coming from the meter.
The mistake is not picking the wrong one. It is picking one and never building the other.
How we run it
With most of the shops we work with, the first 90 days look like this:
- Fix the foundation first. Profile, reviews, photos, and the pages that tell Google where you work and what you do.
- Turn the faucet on. Local Services Ads first, because you pay per lead and the badge does a lot of the trust work for you.
- Track cost per booked job, not cost per click. Clicks do not pay payroll.
- Keep digging the well while the faucet runs, and watch the paid share of your calls drop over time.
If you want somebody to look at your profile, your site, and your ad numbers and tell you straight which one you need first, book a call. Bring your revenue, your service mix, and your market.