Google Local Advertising: Every Way to Advertise Locally on Google

By Corey Frankosky · Last Updated October 1, 2026

Google local advertising is not one product. It is a handful of ad types that all show up when somebody near you searches for what you sell: Local Services Ads at the very top, Search ads targeted to your service area, ads inside Google Maps, and call buttons that let a phone searcher reach you in one tap. Each one charges differently, each one needs a different setup, and the order you add them matters. This guide walks through every way a local business can advertise on Google, what has changed in 2026, how to research keywords and budgets by city, how to track the calls and forms that actually matter, and which option I would start with.

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1The Google local advertising options, side by side

Search "plumber near me" or "dentist in [your city]" and look at the page. You will usually see Local Services Ads first, then text ads, then the map pack (sometimes with a sponsored listing inside it), then organic results. Every one of those paid spots comes from a different campaign type.

Here is how they compare.

The two that capture people who are already searching are Local Services Ads and Search ads. That is where most local businesses should spend first. The rest either support those two or build in reach that works better once your search campaigns are producing.

Question to Answer:

Search your main service plus your city. Which of these four ad types show up, and is your business in any of them?

2Google Business Profile is the foundation

Almost every form of Google local advertising pulls from your Google Business Profile. Your Local Services Ads listing uses your reviews and rating from it. Location assets pull your address, hours, and phone number from it. Maps ads and Performance Max for store goals need it linked before they can promote your location.

So before you spend a dollar on ads, get the profile right. That means:

• Accurate name, address, phone, and hours. Your hours now matter for billing too. More on that in the Local Services Ads section.
• The right primary category. It shapes which searches you show for in the map pack and which LSA categories make sense for you.
• A steady flow of reviews. Reviews are what make somebody tap your listing instead of the one below it, and they feed directly into your LSA ranking.
• A clean business name. Google's location asset requirements say that if a location asset is disapproved for capitalization or symbols, you fix it in the Business Profile itself, then unlink and relink the profile in Google Ads.

If you want the full checklist, our Google Business Profile best practices guide covers categories, photos, posts, and review strategy step by step.

Question to Answer:

Is your Google Business Profile verified, accurate, and collecting new reviews every month?

3Local Services Ads: pay per lead at the top

Local Services Ads are Google's pay-per-lead ads for local service businesses. You do not pay for clicks. You pay when somebody calls, messages, or books through the ad. They show above standard Search ads and the map pack, and they also appear on Google Maps.

There are no keywords. Google decides when you show based on the service categories (job types) you turn on, your service area, your reviews, and how responsive you are. That makes them simpler to run than Search, but you give up control. The job type you need may be broader than what you actually do, which is how an epoxy flooring company ends up paying for carpet leads.

Three things changed recently that a lot of older guides still get wrong:

1. One badge now. Google retired the Google Guaranteed and Google Screened badges and replaced them with a single Google Verified badge. The money back guarantee went with it, so if your website still promises Google's guarantee, pull it.
2. LSAs are moving into Google Ads. Google is migrating Local Services Ads into the Google Ads interface as a Performance Max campaign with a pay-per-lead goal. Pay per lead and placements stay the same, but historical performance reports do not carry over. Export them before your account moves. The full breakdown is in our post on LSAs moving into Google Ads.
3. Missed calls can now be charged. As of October 1, 2026, Google charges for some missed calls that ring longer than 20 seconds during your business hours. If your posted hours are wider than the hours somebody actually answers the phone, you are paying for that gap. Here is what qualifies and what to fix.

On cost, across the accounts I manage the typical range is $40 to $70 per lead, with competitive categories and metros running well above that. Our beginner's guide to how Local Services Ads work covers verification, job types, disputes, and ranking in detail.

Question to Answer:

Is your category eligible for Local Services Ads in your market, and do your posted hours match when someone actually answers the phone?

4Search ads with location and radius targeting

Standard Search ads are the part of local Google Ads where you get full control. You choose the keywords, write the ads, pick the landing page, and decide exactly where the ads show. That control is why I run Search alongside Local Services Ads almost every time.

Location targeting is where local campaigns go right or wrong. You have three main ways to draw your map:

• Cities or counties. Clean and easy to report on. Good when your service area follows town lines.
• ZIP codes. Useful when you want to include the profitable neighborhoods and skip the ones you rarely close.
• Radius targeting. A circle around your address. Works well for storefronts like dentists, gyms, and restaurants where people will only drive so far.

The setting most people miss is the location option underneath. By default, Google uses "Presence or interest," which can show your ads to people who are only interested in your area but live somewhere else. For most local service businesses you want "Presence: People in or regularly in your included locations". Google explains the difference in its advanced location options help page.

From there, build campaigns around services, not every possible keyword. A roofer might run one campaign for roof replacement and one for roof repair, each with tightly themed ad groups, a landing page that matches, and a strong negative keyword list so you are not paying for "roofing jobs" or "how to fix a roof leak."

If you run several offices, the setup gets more involved. Our guide to Google Ads for multi-location businesses covers how to split campaigns and budgets by location.

Question to Answer:

Is your location option set to Presence, and does your targeting match the area you actually want to serve?

5Location assets and call assets

Assets, which Google used to call extensions, add extra information to your Search ads at no extra cost. You still pay your normal cost per click. For a local business, two of them matter most.

Location assets show your address, distance, and a map pin under your ad. They come from your linked Google Business Profile, so you set them up once by linking the profile in Google Ads. Google's location assets help page explains the linking steps. They also make you eligible for local formats on Maps.

Call assets put your phone number in the ad so a mobile searcher can tap and call. This matters more now because call-only ads are going away. Google removed the option to create new call ads in February 2026, and existing call ads stop serving in February 2027. The replacement is a responsive search ad with a call asset attached.

If you still have call-only ads running, do not wait for the cutoff. Build the responsive search ads with call assets now, let them gather data, and pause the old ads once the new ones are performing.

Keep in mind, set your call asset schedule to the hours someone actually picks up. A call button that rings into voicemail at 8 p.m. is a paid click with nothing on the other end.

Sitelinks, callouts, and promotion assets round out the set. Our guide to Google Ads local ad assets walks through each one with setup steps.

Question to Answer:

Are your Search ads showing a location asset and a call asset, and are any old call-only ads still running?

6Google Maps ads and Performance Max for store goals

There is no separate "Google Maps ads" campaign you can buy on its own. Ads on Maps come from two places: Search campaigns with location assets, which can show in Maps results, and Performance Max campaigns built for store goals.

Performance Max for store goals replaced the old Local campaigns. You link your Business Profile, set a budget, and upload headlines, descriptions, and images. Google then optimizes toward store visits and local actions like calls and direction requests. Placements include promoted pins and ads in Maps, Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Business Profile pages, and Waze.

Google also added a setting called Local Customer Optimization to store-goal campaigns. It pushes budget toward people who are close to your location and look ready to visit or call right now. It is opt-in, and it does not work with product feeds. Our write-up on Local Customer Optimization in Performance Max covers the limitations.

Who should run this? Businesses where a visit is the conversion: retail stores, restaurants, gyms, dealerships, clinics with walk-in traffic. A plumber who drives to the customer usually gets more from Local Services Ads and Search first.

The tradeoff is control. You cannot pick keywords or see a clean search terms picture the way you can in Search, so I add it after Search is working and tracking is clean. Our Performance Max setup guide covers asset groups and signals.

Question to Answer:

Is a store visit or direction request actually a conversion for your business, or do your customers mostly call?

7Keyword research by city

Local Services Ads do not use keywords, but your Search campaigns do, and both depend on knowing where the demand actually is. Google Keyword Planner gives you that by city.

Here is the process.

1. Open Keyword Planner and choose Discover new keywords.
2. Enter your core services, like "water heater repair" or "teeth whitening."
3. Change the location from the country to a single city or your full service area.
4. Compare towns one at a time. You will find that one suburb has real search volume and the next one over has almost none.
5. Look at the top of page bid range. A high bid tells you advertisers are paying real money for that term, which usually means it converts.
6. Pull negatives from the same report. Job searches, DIY searches, and "free" searches belong on your negative list before you launch.

Then build a service plus city list for your Search campaigns: "AC repair Myrtle Beach," "emergency plumber Conway," and so on. Pair it with "near me" versions, since people often search without naming a town at all.

Keep in mind, Keyword Planner shows volume ranges, not exact counts, especially on smaller accounts. Use it to rank towns and services against each other rather than to forecast leads to the decimal. Our full walkthrough on finding local search volume by city in Keyword Planner shows each step with screenshots.

Question to Answer:

Which three towns in your service area have the most search volume for your highest-value service?

8Budgets for local Google Ads

The right budget depends on your cost per click, your conversion rate, and how many leads you need. The math is simple: if your cost per lead is $60 and you want 40 leads a month, you need roughly $2,400 in ad spend, assuming your tracking is accurate and your landing page converts.

For Local Services Ads, you currently set a budget and Google spends against it based on demand. Once your account moves into Google Ads, weekly budgets convert to daily average budgets with a monthly cap. Setting a huge budget does not create leads that are not there. If your service area only has so many searches, the spend stops.

For Search, budget by campaign. Put the most money behind your highest-value service in your best towns, and do not spread a small budget across ten services and twenty cities. A campaign that runs out of budget by noon every day misses half the searches in your market, which is what limited by budget means in practice.

For reference, our managed Google Ads clients run a minimum of $3,000 a month in ad spend, with management starting at $1,000 a month. That is not the only way to do it. A smaller business can test Local Services Ads or a tight single-service Search campaign for less. Our Google Ads budget calculator helps you work backward from the leads you need.

Question to Answer:

What is one lead worth to you, and how many leads do you need each month to make the spend profitable?

9Tracking calls and form leads

Local advertising lives or dies on phone calls and form fills, so this is the part you cannot skip. If Google cannot see which clicks turned into leads, Smart Bidding optimizes toward the wrong people.

Here is what you need to track for Search and Performance Max:

• Calls from ads. Calls made from your call asset, counted as a conversion once they pass a minimum duration, such as 60 seconds.
• Calls from your website. Google forwarding numbers or a call tracking tool so you know which website calls came from ads.
• Form submissions. A conversion that fires on the thank you page or on a successful submit, not on the button click.

One of the biggest mistakes I see is counting every click on a phone number as a lead. A tap is an intent signal, not a conversation. Count real calls, and set your primary conversions to the actions you actually want more of.

Local Services Ads track themselves. Every charged lead shows in the dashboard with the job type and location, and you can dispute invalid ones. The job is comparing that cost per lead to your Search cost per lead, so you know where the next dollar should go.

Our guide to tracking phone calls and lead forms in Google Ads walks through the full Google Tag Manager setup.

Question to Answer:

Can you see, in Google Ads, exactly how many calls and forms came from last month's ads?

10Which option to start with

If you are starting from zero, here is the order I would use for most local businesses.

1. Fix your Google Business Profile. Everything else pulls from it.
2. Launch Local Services Ads if your category is eligible. Pay per lead and top placement make it the simplest place to start.
3. Add a Search campaign for your highest-value service in your best towns, with Presence targeting, location assets, and call assets.
4. Set up conversion tracking for calls and forms before you scale either one.
5. Add Performance Max for store goals later, if visits and directions matter to your business.

Running LSAs and Search together means you can show up twice on the same results page, and it gives you two cost per lead numbers to compare. I explain the tradeoffs in Local Services Ads vs Google Search Ads.

Google is only part of the picture. If you want to see how Google fits next to Meta, Microsoft, and organic options, our hub on local business advertising covers every channel.

Question to Answer:

Which one of these five steps is the next one your business has not done yet?