Local Service Ads used to be totally gold. The first few years were crazy.
Now everyone’s caught on. And honestly, part of that’s my fault. I tell a lot of companies to set them up.
But they’re still worth running. Every pest control company should at least try them out.
I run Pest Control SEO, and I’ve helped dozens of companies set up Local Service Ads. Let me show you exactly how to get Google Guaranteed and optimize your LSAs.
What Are Local Service Ads for Pest Control Companies?
I wouldn’t say most because actually a lot of pest control companies know what Google local services ads for pest control companies are at this point. It’s kind of like a very well known secret.
Just for some more background, it was originally Home Service Ads and they came out in 2015 and it was for a very select few types of categories.
Now they have been rebranded to Local Service Ads for pest control and other home services.
And if I’m correct, I believe pest control local service ads came out in either 2020 or 2021, kind of in that range.
So they are still fairly new, obviously. We’re recording here in 2025. So they just came out a few years ago and the first few years they were totally gold. They’re totally crazy.
And now a lot of companies have started to catch on. A lot more people are using them.
Why Pest Control Companies Should Use Local Service Ads
Local service ads for pest control, super important. Every pest control company should at least try them out, because they’re also very easy.
It’s not the same thing as just try out Google Ads or just try out Facebook ads. I get that that feels very overwhelming and it’s kind of crazy.
But local service ads are actually very straightforward.
And I call it an owner-friendly platform. That is something that you can do as a PCO. It doesn’t take an agency or virtual assistants, whatever. This is something that you can actually do yourself.
The Key Steps to Becoming Google Guaranteed
You search up local service ads, you click there and then you click get started and then it will take you through a sign up process.
Google Guaranteed = Local Service Ads for Pest Control
Through that sign up process, and also just to be clear, some people don’t know this, Google Guaranteed means the same thing as pest control Google local services ads.
If you are Google Guaranteed, you have the Google Guaranteed badge and that’s what shows up as a sponsored section on Google. That’s a local service ad for pest control companies.
So if you are Google Guaranteed, that means you are running local service ads. Just for that distinction.
What Information You’ll Need
You’re signing up for local service ads. You’re going to have to give some basic information to start: your name, your business and your business information, how many techs you have. I don’t think it asks for revenue. It’s been a while. Yeah, insurance.
All that kind of basic company information. It’ll ask, depending on where you are and such, it’ll ask for your maybe your LLC and other business information.
But it shouldn’t take too long to get set up. It takes maybe 20 minutes or so, depending on if you have to collect all of those documents and such.
The Verification Process
And then you will get verified. So it might take a week or two weeks. That’s the standard timeframe to get verified.
And then you will get an email from Google saying, “Hey, congrats, you are Google Guaranteed. Welcome to the local service ads program.”
And now you can start running local service ads.
So that’s really the first question. That’s when you set up that account, when you get verified, then you have Google Guaranteed.
How to Optimize Your Local Service Ads
There’s not too many things you can do actually. Local service ads are very basic and this is why it’s an owner-friendly platform, because there’s not too much to do.
Add Quality Photos (10-20 Photos)
Some things that we want to have there to make sure that we have, of the very few things that we can customize, is we want to make sure that we have great photos on there.
You can add, I believe up to 20 photos on your local service ads. It’s either 10 or 20 photos.
We want to make sure that those are really quality, really relevant. There should be people in the photos, just like all the other photos we use. It should be a quality picture of people.
Maybe it’s your technicians and really I kind of just framing it as your technicians smiling doing something.
So there’s your technician smiling in the van, your technician smiling spraying, your technician smiling in the attic, like, but whatever, technician smiling, doing something is a really good combination.
And also ideally the photo is well lit and such. Maybe also having some team photos. Maybe you can just have an outside photo of the truck. It doesn’t necessarily have to have the technician in it.
But those are some simple things you can do regarding photos, because I’ve seen a lot of companies, either they add two photos or they add a lot of photos and it’s just a blurry picture of a raccoon and ants. Come on.
Select the Right Services
Some other ones that we have there are the services that we add on the local service ads for pest and wildlife account.
So this isn’t even so much of optimization, but it’s just are we actually correct here and do we want to spend money on these services?
I believe for pest control local service ads, there’s either 11 or 12 services we can add on our account. So that would be bed bug extermination and control, spider control, kind of general pests, mosquito, all these different things. Wildlife, inspection.
First off, you want to make sure if you don’t provide any of those services, then don’t check those boxes.
You might have an agency do it or something like that. So you want to make sure that those are correct, that you’re not advertising for services that you don’t even do.
Because then you might get leads coming in, they’re calling, and then you end up getting charged for those leads. Maybe even not, but still just why get calls for things that you don’t provide?
Only Do Higher Priced Services
Then something else there is that companies may want to consider only doing the more pricey services.
I’m working with this company in California and their cost per lead is ridiculous. They’re paying like, I think, $150 or so cost per lead.
And what they did, and what I slightly advised them to do is like, let’s get rid of those super low tier services that you don’t want to pay for. It actually doesn’t make sense for you financially anymore.
And this is kind of the thing that’s gone on with local service ads now is that they’re much more expensive because everyone’s running them.
Back in the day when no one was running them, it was much cheaper. And yeah, now they’re going to be much more expensive, unfortunately.
Target the Right Areas
Some other things that we want to make sure of, again, it’s not even so much of optimization, it’s correctness. Are we targeting the right area?
Make sure we add all of our top service areas and also potentially any negative service areas, ones that we want to exclude.
So maybe it’s whatever, this zip code or this city is really bad for some reason. They’re always cheap or maybe we have a bad reputation there for some reason. Then we don’t want to target there.
And make sure that we target all of those other areas.
Keep Your Profile Open 24 Hours
But overall, there’s not too much there. I’ll actually mention one other thing is that if we can, we want to keep the profile and also the Google Business Profile open 24 hours.
This will allow leads to come in nonstop because Google doesn’t want to show your local service ads or your Google Business Profile when you’re shown as closed.
Because why would they? If someone’s dealing with a problem late at night or on the weekend, Google wants to help people solve their problems.
So if they show a closed business, I mean, their problem probably won’t get solved because the business is closed. They want to work with someone that’s open.
So that doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to be open 24 hours every single day, but at least that we have an auto responder, maybe we have a virtual assistant or someone picking up the phone 24/7.
So that way we can collect all of those leads and it also potentially might be cheaper as well if very few people are advertising at those times.
What Impacts Your Ranking on LSA
A huge part of ranking on LSA, just like Google Business Profile, there’s this really interesting overlap between paid and organic with all kinds of different platforms.
There is the overlap with local service ads and Google Business Profile, with Google Ads and the website.
Reviews Are Huge
One I was going to mention here is the reviews that you have.
The reviews on your Google Business Profile, which are tied to your local service ads account now. They actually just implemented this about a year ago or so that now your local service ads account has to be tied to a Google Business Profile.
Because a lot of people in the Philippines, Pakistan, whatever, they were creating basically fake local service ads accounts and they were just running them everywhere.
Maybe there was 10,000 or so that had to get removed because none of them were tied to a Google Business Profile.
So now they are more trustworthy because these Google Business Profiles usually have an address, they usually have some history, they have some reviews, which all tie into trust.
So again, the one I was going to mention there is reviews. Reviews are huge and local service ads will pull from your Google Business Profile reviews.
LSA Reviews Are More Heavily Weighted
But I’ll also mention a little nugget here is that it’s not just your Google Business Profile reviews, even though those are huge.
But another aspect of this is also reviews that you collect directly through local service ads.
A lot of people don’t know this, but the reviews that you collect through local service ads are more heavily weighted.
For whatever reason, it’s seen as more trustworthy. You collected them directly through local service ads. So someone had a good experience with you from local service ads.
So now Google wants to show your local service ads more because Google wants to give people a good experience. They want to solve their problems and all of that.
Answer the Phone
Something else I’ll include there is answering the phone. I’ve seen this one come up a bunch.
When you are not answering the phone, really you should be answering it as fast as possible, but also just pick it up to begin with.
If you’re not picking up the phone, if you’re letting it ring, then Google will naturally demote your ads.
And it’s the same thing with Google Business Profile, which is actually pretty funny. Why would Google want to show you when you’re not picking up the phone, you’re not helping people solve their problems? This is the whole point here.
Whereas maybe Jimmy’s Pest Control who was showing up number two originally, they are picking up the phone every single time and every single lead also is having a really good experience and leaving a review.
So Google is naturally going to want to show them more than your company.
So those are two really big things, but there’s not too much else outside of that.
How to Budget and Bid with Local Service Ads for Pest Control Companies
I actually recommend maxing out your budget to begin with. YOLO.
No seriously, because local service ads for pest control companies are cost per lead.
So Google Ads are cost per click, which means, okay, I know I’m going to get a ton of clicks, but we don’t know if that’s going to result in a conversion or not.
Versus with local service ads, we know that it’s cost per lead. So these are actually qualified phone calls.
Now some of them, it might not, it might be a first service that’s kind of low ticket, and they might not become a recurring customer or whatever.
But these are usually qualified leads.
And also something that ties into that is that they’re coming from Google. People that come from Google versus something like a Facebook ad are going to be just on average higher quality.
Set a High Budget
So I recommend maxing out that budget at least to begin with. Obviously that’s really whatever you’re comfortable with.
So maybe you have $5,000 a month to spend on local service ads. Put that. Just set the budget there.
Because also what local service ads will do, they will purposely start to fall off and try not to spend your whole budget because everyone now is bidding on them.
So it’s like, “Oh, well you set your budget at $5,000. Okay. We’ll make sure to spend like $3,000.”
But this other company who’s huge, they set their budget to $20,000. So we’re going to spend like $15,000 of theirs.
So we also want to have a pretty high budget there actually. And we can modify that accordingly. Maybe you’re actually getting too many leads, but that’s usually not the case because they’re pretty competitive.
How to Effectively Manage Leads Generated by LSA
Obviously we need someone who’s picking up the phone, but there’s not too much else that goes into that.
Something else that we needed to do originally was we had to mark the leads. You’re probably familiar with this, that you had to mark every single lead as is it qualified or is this a bad lead?
And Google, the great thing about local service ads is that you’re only paying per qualified lead.
So before you’d have to actually manage and mark those leads. It was a total pain. You’d have your office manager do them or something.
Google Marks Leads Automatically Now
But now Google will automatically do it for you. Now it’s not totally perfect, but that’s something that has been taken off the list.
Again, they’re just trying to make things as easy for you as possible.
Those are already taken care of. You want to make sure that you’re picking up the phone.
And overall, just like I said, with all the other platforms, someone should just go in and check once a week, make sure that we have the proper budget, making sure things are okay.
Check Policy Violations
Something we want to check is in the left column, we want to check policy violations.
And there’s also another one under that, which I actually forget, they’re basically the same thing of is Google okay with the ads that you’re running?
Sometimes they’ll say, you know, your images are wrong for some reason. We can’t show ads in this area for some reason. There’s some kind of policy violation there that you might have.
So you also want to check those occasionally.
Your ads will actually still show with those, but they just might show less. So we want to make sure that we’re not breaking any rules, that we’re on Google’s good side.
The Bottom Line on Google Local Services Ads for Pest Control Companies
Google local services ads for pest control companies are owner-friendly. You can set them up yourself in 20 minutes. No agency needed.
Google Guaranteed = Local Service Ads. Same thing.
Verification takes 1-2 weeks. Then you’re approved and can start running ads.
Add 10-20 quality photos. Technicians smiling while doing something. Well-lit, real people.
Only select services you actually provide. Consider only high-ticket services if your cost per lead is too high (like $150 in California).
Keep your profile open 24 hours. Use an auto-responder or VA to answer calls anytime.
Reviews matter hugely. LSA reviews are more heavily weighted than Google Business Profile reviews.
Answer the phone immediately. Google demotes your ads if you don’t pick up.
Max out your budget initially. LSAs are cost per lead, not cost per click. Set it high because Google won’t spend it all anyway.
Google automatically marks leads as qualified now. No more manual work.
Check policy violations weekly in the left column.
They’re more expensive now than 2020-2021, but still worth running.
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