Google will reach out to you via a third-party risk management firm and verify your company is legitimate before you can appear on the Local Services list. You may need to undergo these checks:

3rd Party Background Checks

Google will reach out to you via a third-party risk management firm and verify your company is legitimate before you can appear on the Local Services list. You may need to undergo the following checks:

• Business entity check
• Business owner background check
• Service professional background check
• Applicable License checks 
• Liability Insurance Check 

If you are already in business, you will likely pass these checks easily, and within a few weeks. To make this process seamless have all your business licenses and insurance documents saved in PDF format. 

Signing Up for Local Services Ads

To join the list of local services in your area there is a simple sign-up process that involves you creating a service profile that lists the basic information about your company and the services you offer. Keep in mind that this is different from your Google Business Profile as previously mentioned.

Once your company is approved by Google and has gone through the screening process, they will allow you to create a daily budget for clicks that will generate leads based on how much money you are bidding. When a client calls or messages you via GLS and are looking for your services, you pay Google for that lead. More on this later.

How Does Google Local Services Work?

Once you have Signed Up for Local Services Ads your company will be put in the database of all companies in your city/region that offer similar services. When a customer then Googles for a service they need, Google feeds them the companies that offer that service. However, it only lists the top three companies in your region based on certain priorities that Google does not exactly share but based on the experience we can conclude the factors they consider.  

Google lists the companies that get frequent high star ratings, ones that are Google Guaranteed, and companies with money left in their daily click budget. Finally, Google only bills you if a customer clicks on your company and reaches out. 

The following sections will outline the criteria mentioned above. First, let’s talk about some of the things you can do to get into the top three. 

A Highly Rated Company 

This will be the largest hurdle to overcome for a business because you need both a volume of current reviews and a large majority of them need to be in the 4-to-5-star rating range. To achieve a volume of good reviews, you will need to consistently deliver a high-quality experience and flawless service to each and every client you interact with. From point of first contact to the clean-up after an installation, try your best to be service oriented. 

In addition, you will need to ask them to leave you a review after every interaction to help boost the number of reviews you are getting. But once you collect enough 5-Star reviews, your company will start to promote itself and the payoff is massive. We have a separate write-up on Google Reviews we recommend you read. 

Local Services are Only Local 

It is only going to show companies that are in your region, but with the dawn of large service corporations, the odds are slowly becoming stacked against you, as a company is well established even in a small-town or rural community. The bigger the city the harder it will be to be listed in one of these top 3 slots. 

The Google Guarantee 

To become a Google Guaranteed company, you need to go through the screening and verification process set up by Google. This is what Google looks at for HVAC companies: 

• An HVAC professional installs, maintains, and repairs furnaces and central air conditioning systems, among other services.
• The HVAC category is considered an urgent category because consumers will often call an HVAC for time-sensitive, urgent need (heater is broken in freezing temperatures).
• For this reason, HVAC professionals undergo an additional level of screening, including service professional background checks.

• Background check requirements:
  • Business check
  • Owner check
  • Service professional check
• Insurance requirements:
  • General liability insurance
• License requirements:
  • Business license on a province and/or country level
  • Owner license on a province and/or country level

Once you are approved, your company will get a Green Check Mark Badge next to it in all Google Local Services found on Google. This also means customers can get $2000 back if they were not satisfied with your service from Google. At this time, Google covers the cost of this refund, your company may be removed from the Google Local Services List if your work keeps getting refunded.  

Budgeting Your Weekly Clicks & Paying For Leads 

You might be asking how much it costs to advertise via Google Local Services and knows from the outset it is fairly reasonable in terms of other marketing costs. However, the amount of money you put into the weekly click budget is only one part of the equation as you still need to meet the other ranking criteria mentioned above. Once you start to rank in one of the top three slots, how does Google bill you for the leads generated?  

Google auto-generates a phone number for tracking purposes, and if a client uses that to call your company, Google considers that as lead generated if the call is longer than 30 seconds. If you feel a call did not generate a lead, you can go through your call log located in your Google Local Services profile and dispute that call. Keep in mind you have 30 days to dispute any call, after that you are billed for it. For example, if a chatty customer only asked about your company’s hours of operation, you would want to dispute this call, so it does not deduct from your weekly budget.

Setting a weekly budget will depend on how much you want to spend per month or better per lead. We recommend starting with less than $1000 for your weekly budget and setting a cap of $30-40 dollars per call generated. For now, avoid automatic bidding which dynamically adjusts your bid per call as this is only useful with high call volume. 

Remember you are bidding against other companies offering similar services, and your bid is based on your weekly budget and what your budget per call is. Here are a couple of examples of weekly budget vs bid cap vs actual calls.    

Plumbing Company A has a $500 weekly budget and set its bid cap to $37 per call and on average gets two leads a week from Google Local Services. But, during sump pump season they will up their weekly budget and bid spend to react to seasonality in the market. 

HVAC Company B spends more on generating leads and has a weekly budget of $2000 and bids at $48 per call in July, they yield 100 calls in that month. However, in November they used the same numbers and only generated 50 calls that month. 

Let’s discuss how Companies A and B were billed by Google. Company A did not come close to reaching its weekly budget. Company A will be billed after 30 days for the 10 calls generated which amount to $370. We can see the weekly budget was not hit for the entire 30-day billing cycle. While the weekly cap was set at $500 there was not enough market volume in the last 30 days. So even if they set the weekly budget to $1000, the same number of calls would have occurred. But $370 for 10 calls is an excellent marketing spend.     

However, Google also has a billing threshold of $1000 dollars and if it is hit at any point during the 30 days then you are billed that day. So, with HVAC Company A, where 100 calls are generated at $48 per call in a single month, they reach the billing threshold after 21 calls. Less than halfway through the 30-day billing period. Since Company set a budget of $2000 a week, they were able to scoop up all 100 calls. Their total spend for Google Local Services was $4800, but their theoretical max spend would have been $8000 for 30 days. The point to take away from Company A is they are able to take advantage of all calls they got in the month but set the appropriate weekly budget.