Google Ads
Everything else I do compounds slowly. This is the one channel that can put you at the top of the page tomorrow morning, for exactly as long as you want to be there.
The gap
Local SEO is the right long-term answer and it is genuinely slow. Map pack movement takes 60 to 90 days. Organic takes three to six months. That is honest, and it is also useless to somebody with a truck payment due and a schedule with holes in it.
Ads exist to cover that stretch. Every one of those searches is happening right now whether or not you are ranking yet, and the only question is whether somebody else gets the call while you wait. Running both is not doubling up. It is buying the months back.
SEO and PPC together
Split them across two vendors and you pay twice for the same research, and neither one is looking at what the other found.
A campaign produces the list of searches that actually turned into phone calls, with real money behind each one. That is better keyword research than any tool sells, because it is evidence rather than an estimate, and it points the slower work at terms already proven to convert in your market.
As organic and map pack positions come in for a term, you can pull spend off it and move that budget to something you have not won yet. The ad bill goes down while the leads stay up, which is only possible if the same person is watching both.
This is also the answer to whether you should do one or the other. Ads first if you need work soon, but ads on their own means renting your customers indefinitely. Local SEO is the half you keep.
How it is priced
Most ads management is billed as a percentage of what you spend. Look at what that pays for: the person advising you on your budget earns more every single time that budget goes up. That is a conflict sitting in the middle of the relationship, and you would never know which recommendations it was quietly bending.
A flat band pays me the same whether I tell you to raise your spend or cut it in half. It is the only version of this where my advice on your budget is worth anything.
$1,500
$2,500
$3,500
$5,000
$7,500
At the smallest budget the two land within a few dollars of each other. The gap opens as you spend more, and the fee stays where it is while your budget moves.
Also true
A one-time $500 campaign build covers setup: keyword research, ad groups, copy, extensions and conversion tracking. Roughly five hours of work that does not repeat. Your ad spend is billed by Google directly and never passes through me, so you can see exactly what went where. The top band has no ceiling: at $6,000 of spend the fee is $600, and at $12,000 it is still $600.
When to skip this
Not because it is too small to bother with. Because a small budget is the one most likely to be wasted. Google needs conversions before it can work out who to show your ad to, and a budget that only buys a handful of clicks a week never gives it enough to learn from. The campaign stays stuck guessing, and you pay full price for every one of those guesses.
The same problem hits the optimization. Cutting a keyword because it wasted money, or backing one because it produced calls, needs enough clicks behind it to be a pattern rather than a coincidence. On a small budget you run out of money before you have the evidence, so you have bought a month of learning and nothing else. Spend enough to get past that and the rest of the budget goes to work. Spend under it and you are mostly buying tuition.
Competition is what decides where that line actually sits. A barbershop here may be running against almost nobody, where a small budget goes a long way. Plumbing will not be like that. The audit tells us which one you are, and if the answer is that your money is better spent on your profile or your website first, that is what I will say.
If you are a trade, read this first
Plumbing, HVAC, roofing and electrical have something sitting above the ads on this page: Local Services Ads . They are billed per lead rather than per click, they carry the blue Google Verified check, and when they appear they take the top of the page ahead of everything else. In a 2026 study of 500 home services searches they showed up in 28% of them and held position one every time they did. For a lot of trades that is where the first dollar belongs, and I will tell you if it is you.
What is included
Build
The campaign build is a one-time $500. It is the part that decides whether everything after it works, and it is roughly five hours that does not repeat.
Weekly
Most wasted ad spend is not dramatic. It is a slow leak through searches you never wanted to pay for, and it only gets caught by somebody reading the search terms report.
Reporting
Two numbers matter: what you spent and what came back. Everything else is context for those two.
Questions
Both, if the budget allows, and ads first if you need work soon. Ads are the only channel with no lag, so they cover the gap while local SEO builds. SEO is the one you keep. The two also feed each other: your ads produce a list of the exact searches that turned into calls, and that is better keyword research than any tool sells, which then points the SEO work at terms already proven to convert.
A flat monthly fee banded by your ad spend: $250 a month for $1,500 to $2,500 of spend, $350 for $2,501 to $3,500, $450 for $3,501 to $5,000, and $600 for anything above that. Plus a one-time $500 campaign build. The top band has no ceiling, so the fee stops climbing even as your spend keeps going. Your ad spend is billed by Google directly and never passes through me.
Because it pays me to talk you into spending more. A percentage model means the person advising you on your budget earns more every time that budget goes up, which is a conflict sitting right in the middle of the relationship. A flat band pays me the same whether I tell you to raise your spend or cut it, so the advice is worth something.
About $1,500 a month. Below that, the problem is not that the budget is small, it is that it is the most likely to be wasted. Google needs conversion data before it can work out who to show your ad to, and a budget buying only a handful of clicks a week never gives it enough to learn from, so the campaign keeps guessing at full price. The same applies to my side of the optimization: cutting or backing a keyword needs enough clicks behind it to be a pattern rather than a coincidence. Competition decides where that line really sits, and the free audit is what tells us which situation you are in.
SEM, search engine marketing, is the umbrella term covering both paid search and organic SEO, though most people saying SEM mean paid search specifically. PPC, pay-per-click, is the billing model behind Google Ads: you pay when somebody clicks, not when your ad is shown. In practice all three terms get used for the same work.
Traffic starts the day the campaign goes live. The first 30 days are a learning period while Google gathers conversion data and I adjust bids and copy against real performance, so judge it on month two rather than week one. Compare that with 60 to 90 days for map pack movement and three to six months for organic.
The traffic stops the same day, which is the honest weakness of this channel and the reason I would not sell it to you on its own for long. Ads rent attention. Local SEO builds something you keep. Running ads while the slower work compounds is the point, not paying for clicks forever.
Free audit
The audit looks at your site, your Google Business Profile and where you currently stand. It runs automatically and lands in your inbox in about three minutes.
If your market is quiet enough that you do not need to buy clicks, or your website would waste them, the audit will say so.
