Google Local Service Ads for Lawn Care Companies

Two years ago we tried offering Local Service Ads management as a service for clients and failed miserably. Well, that’s an exaggeration. What really happened is we tried them out for a few clients and they didn’t work immediately from the start, and with everything else on our long to-do list, we didn’t have the time to figure them out.

Google touts Local Service Ads (“LSAs”) as this simple marketing service that doesn’t even require an agency to be involved, and their propaganda is so strong even we started to believe them.  So, we told our clients if they wanted to do LSAs, they should just do it themselves. Some clients didn’t want to do it themselves, so they kept bugging us to try again, so I finally decided to go full-nerd and figure it out. I’m talking blackout curtains, a 12-pack of A&W Root Beer Zero, and no leaving my office chair except for bathroom breaks or to shower when I started to smell myself. You know what I mean? Deep work — the kind where you lose track of time then look at the clock and it’s 2:00 AM. That was me with LSAs. I did that.

As a result, I can tell you a lot. Some of Google’s LSA customer support team knows me and our agency by name. I’m sure some of them hate me for how many hours of their time I wasted on the phone getting answers that couldn’t be found anywhere else. I still don’t know as much as I would like, but I’ve learned the critical things lawn care businesses need to know to run successful LSAs.

Before I get into it, there are a few important things I want to note:

1. Read this whole article. There are a lot of important parts to LSAs that Google doesn’t make clear. I can’t organize this by order of importance because it’s all important. Seriously, read this like you would your first marriage certificate.
2. In the future, this guide will eventually break. Google update the LSA platform causing some parts of this guide to become outdated. I want to believe I’ll come back and update it, but I have provided links to Google’s important corresponding documentation at the end in case I don’t.
3. You don’t need an agency involved to run Local Service Ads. LSAs are much easier and more forgiving than regular Google Ads. I would compare LSAs to language learning:  You can totally teach yourself how to learn a language without paying for classes and save a lot of money. How many people actually do, though? Not many. When you pay for language classes, it holds you accountable to studying properly. Having an agency involved to help with your LSAs can hold you accountable to making sure your LSAs perform the best they can.

Local service ads onboarding for lawn care businesses

The hardest part about LSAs is the screening and verification process (i.e. onboarding). As an agency, our view for setting up a new LSA account for a client looks different from someone entirely new to the LSA platform. But regardless of the differences at the beginning of the process, everyone eventually ends up at the business verification portal overview screen. This shows everything you need to complete in order to run LSAs. Yours might look slightly different, but it generally looks like this:

Let’s go over these one at a time.

Licenses

Google requires that businesses hold certain industry-relevant licenses to run LSAs. The specific type of license varies by location and provider category (for example: lawn care provider vs. landscaper). Some category and location combinations, such as snow removal in Iowa, don’t require a license. Sometimes a category will give you choices for what kind of license you can provide, but only require that you supply one. If you want to advertise in multiple provider categories, you should expect to supply multiple licenses.

The amount of information I can give you about license requirements for LSAs in the lawn care category is limited because the rules vary by region. What I can say is that Google usually requires a pesticide applicator license, even if you only do mowing / maintenance, not lawn treatments.

If you’ve been keeping up with me, you might be thinking, “Why do I need a pesticide applicator license to advertise for mowing and maintenance?”

That’s a great question. I have asked the LSA support team multiple times, and they have assured me that their very smart lawyers have conducted very smart assessments, and because they are Google and very smart, this is a good thing to do because their lawyers said so.

The following is a list of lead categories underneath the lawn care provider category. Out of the nine in total, only two typically require an applicator license.

But if Google is the Mafia, Local Service Ads are their turf. They make the rules, so if you only mow and want to do LSAs (heck, if you only do sprinkler repair and maintenance and want to do LSAs), I’ll tell you the same thing I tell our clients:  Go get your applicator license. You don’t have to offer the service, you just need the license.

Billing information

Setting up billing is a pretty uneventful thing, but there are two points worth noting here.

First, if you already have a Google Ads account, you can choose to either use the same billing profile as your existing Google Ads account or create a new one. It’s not a huge deal, but we recommend creating a new one. It’s a little easier for accounting to keep the two separate, and a shared billing profile will stop both accounts if you ever get suspended.

Second, although everything else is managed directly in Local Service Ads, billing and access are both managed through Google Ads. Why? I don’t know. It’s like they made it to 80% completion, got tired, and decided to borrow from Google Ads for these last two features. So if you need to make changes to your payment method or grant someone access to your LSA account, you’ll need to do that through Google Ads.

proof of insurance

Google requires that lawn care companies have general liability and professional liability insurance to run Local Service Ads. You will need to submit a certificate of insurance (COI) in PDF format. Some of their requirements are pretty self-explanatory (the certificate shouldn’t expire too soon, coverage amount must meet the minimum determined for your location), but I want to point out important parts that need to be included on the COI that often get overlooked.

• The name on the COI must match the business name you intend to advertise with. If it’s different, you must provide a Doing Business As (DBA) certificate or equivalent document in addition to the COI.
• The business address must cover the service area in which you will advertise.
• The policy number must be displayed.
• The document should include a signature.

One thing that often confuses insurance companies when you ask them for a certificate of insurance for Local Service Ads is the certificate holder. If your insurance company asks you for a certificate holder, it should be your business name. They might think this is weird, but Google is only requiring you to prove your business has insurance; they are not becoming a certificate holder themselves. You can copy this paragraph and send it to them as an explanation.

background check

In the United States and Canada, LSA providers in the home services vertical are generally required to complete background checks. Google says this can include background checks for the business, business owner, and their field worker roster (both employees and contractors, including subcontractors or other workers who provide services in customers’ homes, workplaces, or any other properties). Fortunately (at least as I write this), the lawn care provider category only requires background checks for the business and business owner.

As a lawn care marketing agency and not a lawn care company, the background check portion of the onboarding process is the part about which we know the least. On our end, we slap the owner’s email into a form, give them a heads up to watch out for an email to complete the background check, and then wait. We’re not allowed to be involved.

What we do know is that you should take it seriously, because if you fail the background check, you’re ineligible for Local Service Ads. So treat it like you’re being audited by the IRS or FBI, not hurriedly clicking through a medical questionnaire before a doctor’s appointment.

Oh — and if you’re in a hurry to get up and running with LSAs, it’s a good idea to complete the background check first. Out of all the steps in Local Service Ads onboarding, the background check takes the longest time to process (expect a few weeks).

business profile & customer reviews

Local Service Ads will automatically connect your account to the corresponding Google Business Profile (“GBP”) for your business. You can, and should, confirm this is correct by making sure the linked GBP details match those of your GBP. If they don’t, call the LSA support team. They’ll set it straight.

An important point we make to all of our clients is that LSAs and shady SEO don’t mix. What I mean by that is if you’re doing things like putting your Google Business Profile at fake addresses, that’s not going to work long-term with LSAs. I don’t know why anyone thinks it would for a service that requires you to provide licenses, proof of insurance, and submit to a background check, but some people still try. It’s common throughout the LSA onboarding process for Google Business Profiles to go through reverification. That’s getting increasingly difficult to do when your GBP address is a cornfield.

In order to complete the connection between your Local Service Ads account and Google Business Profile, the email address you used to sign up for LSAs (the Admin) must also be an Owner or Manager of the GBP. It might take a few days, but once this is done the LSA & GBP verification should happen automatically.

As for reviews, lawn care providers must have a minimum of three reviews on their Google Business profile to be eligible for Local Service Ads. It’s not a lot, but if you’re just starting out, make sure to get some reviews!

One final note about the LSAs and GBPs — Google Business Profiles can only be connected to one Local Service Ads account at a time; LSA accounts and GBP accounts can only be disconnected one of two ways:

1. Calling the LSA support team and requesting that they disconnect your GBP from the old LSA account.
2. Waiting until Google purges your LSA account after 6 – 12 months of inactivity (but we have also seen accounts not get purged after a year).

If an agency manages your LSAs, you can’t just run away and set up a new LSA account. You need to be able to verify with the LSA support team that the old account was / is you, and that requires old account access and information. It also means the agency can hold your account for ransom.

If you choose to work with an agency, don’t burn any bridges, and work with one you can trust to do the right thing even after things end.

local services ads campaign management

I skipped over Bidding and Budget in the business verification portal because they’re better covered here. Once you collect the necessary green checkmarks and get the Google Guarantee badge…then what? Well, that’s when you can finally start setting up your ad.

Aside from the big slider that turns your ad on and off, here are the things to which I recommend giving extra attention:

• AD SCHEDULE – This determines when your ad will show. Your average response time impacts your ad quality, which impacts your ad rankings, so whatever you set here, make sure you have people prepared to answer the phone when your ads are running.
• Business bio – This section lets you select callouts to show with your ad.
• Budget and bidding – How you want to bid, how much you want to bid, how much you want to spend.
• Job types – Here you select the type of leads you want.
• Photos – Upload photos to show with your ad. Important.
• Settings – Here you can opt-in to message leads, which can be emails, text messages, or both. For text messages, you can specify a different phone number from your general business phone number. Direct business search allows you to show when people search specifically for your business.
• Service areas – This determines where your ad will show.
• Top impression rate on Search – In a separate area under the Reports section, the Top impression rate metrics give you an idea of how often your ad is showing compared to how often it could be showing (if you increased your budget, bids, ad ranking, etc).

Local Service Ads Leads Management

Let’s talk quickly about leads. When you get a lead, you will receive an email notification from Local Service Ads. Click through that email to see the lead details.

Remember how I mentioned your response time impacts your ad rankings? That’s important here. Make a habit of doing the following:

• Entering a customer name with notes.
• Marking a lead as archived or booked (with the subsequent details).
• Rate the lead (sometimes this can trigger a credit for bad leads).

When you do this, it trains the system to deliver better, more suitable leads for your business. And again, the faster you can do it, the better.

That’s pretty much it! Definitely not all of it, but enough to get you started. If you have questions, go ahead and drop them in the comments. If you’re interested in having us help out with your marketing, reach out and let us know.

Reference Links

• Google Local Service Ads (With Phone Number for Support)
• Google’s Documentation on the Screening and Verification Process
• Google Documentation on Business Screening and Verification Requirements (Specifically for Lawn Care)