Local Services Ads are the better product for most trades. Pay per lead rather than per click, a verification badge, and placement above everything else on the page.
Plenty of businesses cannot run them. The eligible category list is finite, coverage does not extend to every market, and verification takes weeks and sometimes fails. If any of that applies to you, standard Search ads are the fallback, and they behave differently enough that treating them as a substitute is how budgets get wasted.
What clicks actually cost
Published figures vary widely, which tells you how much market and trade dominate the average.
Across all US Search campaigns, median cost per click sits around $4.52 with an average near $8.34. WordStream's benchmark for the Home and Home Improvement category comes in at $8.33. Broader local service categories are commonly quoted at $3 to $9.
Then some sources report home service CPCs of $15 to $70, and legal or home improvement keywords running $8 to $60 in competitive metros.
Both can be true. The low numbers describe general and off-peak inventory; the high ones describe emergency intent in a dense market at the moment demand spikes. If you sell emergency work in a city, assume the top of the range rather than the middle.
The minimum budget is higher than you want it to be
This is the part that decides whether Search ads are viable for you at all.
Below roughly $1,000 a month, an account generally cannot generate enough click volume to collect meaningful conversion data or optimise on it. Reported minimum viable spend for a local business in a metro market is $800 to $2,000 a month, with $1,000 to $3,000 the common starting range.
That is not a vendor upsell, it is arithmetic. Consider a realistic worked example: a target of ten new service calls a month, a $5.50 cost per click, and an 8% conversion rate. That needs 125 clicks, which is $688, and the sensible move is rounding to $750 or $1,000 to absorb variance and let the system learn.
Now run the same maths at a $15 click and a 5% conversion rate, which is entirely plausible for emergency plumbing in a competitive market. Ten calls needs 200 clicks and $3,000.
The honest test is whether you can commit the floor for three months. Two hundred dollars a month in a competitive category buys you a handful of clicks and no information.
Quality Score is the lever you actually control
Here is the most useful thing in this article, because it is the one part of the auction a small advertiser can genuinely move.
A campaign with a Quality Score of 8 might pay $5.50 per click where a competitor with a score of 5 pays $9 for the same position. That is roughly a 40% difference in what you pay for identical placement, decided by relevance rather than budget.
Three things move it for a local service business.
Tight ad groups. One service per ad group, with the ad text and keywords matching. An ad group containing drain cleaning, water heaters, and bathroom remodels cannot write a relevant ad for any of them.
Landing page match. The click should land on a page about the specific service, not your homepage. If you have built service area pages, they are already the right destination.
Call extensions. For a trade, most conversions are phone calls. Extensions let people call directly from the search result, which improves both conversion rate and the relevance signals underneath.
Negative keywords save more money than anything else
At small budgets this matters more than bidding strategy.
Without a negative list you will pay for "plumber salary," "plumbing courses," "how to fix a leaking tap yourself," and every DIY variation of your trade. Those clicks convert at approximately zero and consume budget that has no room to spare.
Build the list before launching, add to it weekly from the search terms report for the first month, and check it monthly thereafter. On a $1,000 budget this is frequently the difference between a channel that works and one that does not.
Where you are structurally disadvantaged
Worth knowing rather than discovering.
You pay per click, not per lead. Someone who clicks, reads for four seconds and leaves has cost you $8 and produced nothing. LSAs never charge for that.
There is no badge. The Google Verified checkmark appears on LSAs, not on Search ads, so you are competing on ad copy alone.
And you are bidding against national aggregators. Angi, Thumbtack and the lead marketplaces buy the same keywords you do, with far larger budgets, in order to resell the resulting leads back to contractors. You are effectively competing for your own customers against companies whose business model is selling them to you.
What to do if you are below the floor
If you cannot commit around $1,000 a month, Search ads are probably not the right channel yet, and that is a legitimate conclusion rather than a failure.
The money goes further in the free work. A complete Google Business Profile with the services section filled in. Reviews, recent ones especially. Pages for the towns you actually serve. Answering the phone. None of that costs media spend and all of it compounds, which advertising does not.
Then revisit Search once those are done, because a better landing page and a stronger profile also lower what you pay per click when you do start.
The honest read
If you are excluded from Local Services Ads and you have a genuine budget, Search works. Run it narrowly: one campaign, tightly themed ad groups, a hard negative list, service-specific landing pages, call extensions, and geographic targeting matched to the radius that is actually profitable for you.
Judge it on cost per booked job rather than cost per click, give it ninety days, and check the search terms report every week for the first month. Most Search accounts that fail for local businesses fail on those last two points rather than on the bidding.