Think I finally Figured Out How LSA's work

Been running local service ads for a few clients over the past 2 years and I've had mixed results. Some clients were getting three to five leads a day, while others in the same niche would get one lead a month. I couldn't for the life of me figure it out until I ran some experiments the last few months. Here's what I found:

Location Matters Most: before you agree to run LSA's for a client, do a little research about the area they are in and what competition they face. If it's a densely populated area with hundreds of competitors, many of which have over a thousand Google reviews, then it doesn't matter how high you set your budget, you will not be seen by anyone. You're better off running PPC ads which is way more fair in terms of who shows up at the top. I have two HVAC clients running LSAs in a similar area. One of them gets a steady flow of leads everyday, the other one had one lead in 3 months. Budget was the same, services were the same, they both have a similar amount of Google reviews. The difference is one of them had a 60 mile service radius and the other 20 miles. The one that was getting the leads was getting them mainly from smaller less populated towns further away and the One that wasn't getting any leads didn't want to travel and was stuck in a very densely populated city. As a test I expanded his service area and wouldn't you know, he started getting out of town leads.

2. Make sure the business name has the service in it. For example if your client does landscaping, you want to make sure their business name has the word landscaping in it. Same thing with plumbing and HVAC. One of my landscaping clients was getting a lot of impressions but not a lot of calls. His business name didn't have the word landscaping or lawn care in it and so when people were searching for those services, they would click the other business that did have those. When I added it to the business name, the leads came in more frequently.

3. Adding photos of people doing work is a difference maker. Don't use AI generated or stock images, and don't only post pictures of the jobs. Post pictures of people actually doing the jobs. Those listings tend to get ranked higher.

4. I didn't notice a big correlation between picked up calls and more leads. My HVAC client that gets the most leads frequently misses calls but the leads keep coming in. I have others that answer every single call and don't get as many. Maybe it is a big factor, but not one that I've noticed

5. You want to make sure you get a steady stream of Google reviews. Don't run one big campaign to get 50 reviews at once. You want to make sure you spread them out and get one or two every few days. Google likes that kind of activity.

Hope this helps anyone that might be frustrated like I was.

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