Operations
A UK trade's decision made on your own job value and close rate: what £300 a month buys in clicks, and the 28 categories Google's pay-per-lead ads accept.
Verithora 31 Aug 2026 Updated 15 Sept 2026 14 min read
With £300 a month spare, the answer for most one van to eight van trades is that none of it goes to Google Ads until you have done 5 minutes of arithmetic. Often that arithmetic says ads cannot work at your job value and close rate, so the money belongs in the free profile and your own site. Sometimes it says the opposite, and we name that case below. We sell websites, we do not sell or manage Google Ads, and we take no commission, so discount this accordingly.
We sell pay-monthly websites at £49, £79 and £200 a month, £0 setup and a 30-day money-back guarantee, plus one-off builds, maintenance, redesigns, local SEO and Google Business Profile management. So we have an obvious interest in the answer that ends “spend it on your website”.
Most pages answering this question are published by someone selling one of the three channels. Read them with the seller in view.
It turns on your own job value, gross profit and close rate, not a published benchmark. Fill this in from your last 20 jobs.
A Average job value, before VAT £ ____
B Jobs won per 10 enquiries ____
C Gross profit on that job £ ____
D Gross profit per enquiry £ ____
E Enquiries per 100 visitors ____
F Most you will pay per enquiry £ ____
G Break-even cost per click £ ____Two are sums: D is C times B divided by 10, and G is D times E divided by 100.
Line C is what is left after materials and a day of labour, not the invoice total. Turnover cannot pay for a click.
Line E is enquiries, not form fills. On driveway and roof work the phone calls are usually the bigger half. Put a tracking number on your ad landing page, or read the tap-to-call clicks in Google Ads, and add those to your forms. Count forms alone and you understate your conversion, which drags G down towards the answer that suits us.
Line F is judgement with a ceiling: it can never exceed D, because above that every enquiry loses money. Our rule of thumb is a third of D. That is our rule, not Google’s.
Worked with invented figures. A is £450 and B is 4. C is £160, so D is £64. E is 3, so G is £1.92, and F at a third of D is about £21. The rest of this piece compares against G.
The figure you need is not a blog’s national average. It is what advertisers have paid for your term in your town.
Those columns are not a cost per click, which is where most guides go wrong. Google defines the low column as “an approximation of the 20th percentile” and the high as “an approximation of the 80th percentile” of what advertisers have historically paid for that keyword’s top of page bid, over the last 30 days (Google Ads Help, checked 31 August 2026).
So quote yourself a range, never a point estimate.
Divide £300 by each end of your range for a click count, then apply line E to get enquiries.
Say the range comes back at £1.20 to £4.50. £300 buys 66 to 250 clicks, which at 3 enquiries per 100 visitors is 2 to 7 enquiries, or 1 to 3 jobs at a close rate of 4 in 10.
Now the honest split, because the two ends give opposite answers. At £4.50 a click, 66 clicks buy 2 enquiries at about £150 each against £64 of gross profit, so the campaign loses on everything it produces. At £1.20, 250 clicks buy 7 enquiries at about £43 each against the same £64, clearing about £150 over the £300. Line G, at £1.92, is where one becomes the other.
So ads are not automatically wrong at £300. What is wrong is buying before you have pulled the range. Even the profitable end hands Google two thirds of the gross profit per enquiry, and a close rate of 3 in 10 puts D at £48, so a £43 enquiry takes nearly all of it.
Here is the case that costs us money. If your site converts, you do emergency work, and the low end of your bid range sits under line G, the £300 belongs in clicks.
You set an average daily budget for each ad campaign. Google defines it as “The average amount that you set for each ad campaign on a per-day basis” (Google Ads Help, checked 31 August 2026). Its spending limits page states “Your daily spending limit (two times your average daily budget for most campaigns) on any particular day” and “Your monthly spending limit (30.4 times your average daily budget for most campaigns) in any particular month” (Google Ads Help, checked 31 August 2026).
So on £300 the average daily budget is about £9.87, and one busy Tuesday can be charged at about £19.74. The day can double, the month cannot. That limit is per campaign, so two campaigns means two limits.
Buy evenly and you buy the same clicks in January as in April, which on driveway, patio and garden work is money burnt. Spend where your invoices say the demand is.
A second Google product charges per lead rather than per click: you “Pay only for leads related to your business and the services that you offer” (Google Local Services Ads Help, checked 31 August 2026).
Check your trade before you spend an evening on the sign-up. Google’s UK page carries 28 nationwide categories, in its own labels and order:
(Google Local Services Ads Help, checked 31 August 2026.)
Some labels read like imports, snow removal most of all, and we copy them as published. HVAC means heating and air conditioning, moving services means removals, worktop services is countertops, and general contractor is the nearest label to a builder.
The omissions matter more. Pressure washing, driveway cleaning, gutter cleaning, painting and decorating appear nowhere as categories, and neither does locksmiths. Those trades cannot sign up under their own name, though that does not prove none has been accepted under an adjacent label. Carpet cleaning and cleaning services are listed, but there is no exterior category.
Do not take any eligibility list on trust, ours included. Open Google’s page above and search it for your trade.
Legal and estate agent work is restricted to one region.
Currently available in Greater London only: Contract lawyer services, Corporate lawyer services, Criminal lawyer services, Employment lawyer services, Estate agent services, Family lawyer services, Immigration lawyer services, Insolvency lawyer services, IP lawyer services, Lawyer services, Litigation lawyer services, Malpractice lawyer services, Personal injury services, Probate lawyer services, Property lawyer services, Road traffic lawyer services, Tax lawyer services
No trade category is London-restricted. The page also names categories shut out of what Google calls pre-badge ads: “Pre-badge ads aren’t available for garage door services, healthcare verticals and locksmiths.” That is a separate product rule, and it does not put locksmiths on the UK list. (Google Local Services Ads Help, checked 31 August 2026.)
Most advice about the badge is out of date. Google “will be discontinuing the Money Back Guarantee associated with the Google Guarantee badge”, and consumers “can submit the request for reimbursement for services booked through Local Services Ads before December 7, 2025”. The same page adds that “Requests must be submitted within 30 days of the initial service completion date” (Google Local Services Ads Help, checked 31 August 2026). That cutoff passed nearly nine months ago, and the 30-day window runs from job completion, not booking. The page names no country, so this is not a UK carve-out.
What you earn now is the Google Verified badge, a screening mark rather than a guarantee to your customer. The UK availability page carries “Inspire confidence with the Google Verified badge (select verticals only)” and “The Google Verified badge is currently unavailable for verticals in the automotive, beauty and dining categories” (Google Local Services Ads Help, checked 31 August 2026). Google names no trade among the exclusions, so we read a category on the list of 28 as able to earn it. That is our read, not a Google statement.
We read Google’s published page on 31 August 2026 and did not open the sign-up flow.
The first is search partners. “When you create a campaign for the Search Network, search partners are included by default” (Google Ads Help, checked 31 August 2026). From the same page: “Google Ads doesn’t provide information detailing the website where your ad was shown on the Search Network, unless you are running a Performance Max campaign.”
To turn it off: Campaigns, select your campaign, gear icon, Networks dropdown, untick “Include Google search partners”, then Save. If that menu has moved, search Google Ads help for “search partners”.
The second is broad match. “Broad match is the default match type that all your keywords are assigned”, and “Ads may show on searches that are related to your keyword, which can include searches that don’t contain the direct meaning of your keywords” (Google Ads Help, checked 31 August 2026).
Together those two burn most first budgets. Google may serve “flat roof repair Redhill” against searches that do not carry that meaning, on sites it will not name. Start every keyword in exact match and switch search partners off before you go live.
This is our practice, not a Google rule, and on exterior cleaning it decides whether the budget survives the first week. “Pressure washer” and “jet wash” are typed by people buying or hiring a machine, or looking for a job, far more often than by anyone booking a driveway, and you are billed for all of it. Exact match narrows the field but does not do the negatives’ job.
Add these before you switch anything on, not after the first invoice.
hire
rental
for sale
second hand
machine
screwfix
jobs
vacancies
salary
diy
course
trainingThen read the search terms report weekly and add whatever else turned up.
Your Google Business Profile costs nothing and it is where most local customers find a van. Google ranks it on three things. “Relevance is how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for.” “Distance refers to how far each business is from the customer who’s searching.” “Prominence means how well-known a business is. Prominent places are more likely to show up in search results.” (Google Business Profile Help, checked 31 August 2026.)
Then the sentence the channel turns on, from that page: “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.”
Distance is fixed by where you are, and no agency can ask Google to move it. The town 18 miles away has to be won on your own site, with a real page about the work you do there.
We have written up the profile set-up for a van trade working from a home address and the legal way to ask for reviews, the lever that moves prominence. Pull both before anything is paid for.
SEO is the only one of the three where the asset is yours at the end. Stop paying for ads and the phone stops that afternoon. Stop paying for SEO and the pages drift over months, not days.
Nobody can tell you how long it takes. Google will not: “Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months”, and “In general, you likely want to wait a few weeks to assess whether your work had beneficial effects in Google Search results” (Google Search Central, checked 31 August 2026).
We can show you what it looks like on a real trade site, because we own one and can publish its raw numbers. Sameday Jetwash is a pressure washing business we run ourselves, so this is not an arm’s length client result and we will not present it as one. In the 90 days to 11 August 2026 its clicks grew from 125 to 9,126, and its average search position improved from 28.8 to 12.8. Read the split before you copy it. Two hosepipe ban guides earned 8,423 of those 9,126 clicks, 92.3 per cent of the total. Strip those two pages out and the rest of the site grew from 125 clicks to 703. Guides written for a live question did the work, not service pages, and the unedited Search Console export is on the Sameday Jetwash case study.
You will see “four months to a year” quoted all over this topic, usually attributed to Google. It is not in the current Search starter guide, which we read on 31 August 2026. We will not repeat a figure we cannot trace, and nor should the agency quoting it.
This is our judgement, not Google policy. No Google source says emergency intent favours paid search.
A burst pipe, or a roof leaking into a bedroom: that customer buys inside the hour and rings the first credible number he finds. If distance keeps your profile out of his results, a paid click is the only lever that moves today.
So ads go first in one situation: you do emergency work, you want customers outside your profile’s radius, and the low end of your bid range sits under line G. If any one of those is false, ads are not the first move.
One action per budget, rather than a menu.
| Monthly budget | The one thing to do with it | Why |
|---|---|---|
| £300 | Buy no clicks unless your site converts, you do emergency work, and the low end of your bid range sits under line G. If any one is false, the £300 goes into the site and the profile. | An average day is under £10, and a bid above line G loses on every click. |
| £600 | Keep site and profile running, then one exact-match campaign on your best emergency term, partners off and negatives loaded. | One term in one town is all you can read at this spend. |
| £1,000 | Add real pages for the towns your profile’s distance will never reach, and hold the ads at the emergency term. | Distance cannot be bought, so outer towns are won on the site. |
| £2,000 and up | Split the budget by town and by service, not by channel, and read the numbers weekly. | At that size, a week of search terms already tells you something. |
If you are a pressure washer, driveway or gutter cleaner, painter, decorator or locksmith, no category names your trade at any budget above, though that does not prove none has been accepted under an adjacent label. Your version of each row is the profile and the reviews, then the site.
A website’s monthly cost against a monthly ad budget over 5 years is a separate sum, and we have worked it through.
Three things must be true of your site first.
Set your stop rule in clicks, not pounds, and give the campaign 200 clicks before you judge it. At 3 enquiries per 100 visitors, 50 clicks should produce one or two, so none is an ordinary result rather than a verdict. This is our rule, not Google’s.
At the £4.50 end of the worked range, 200 clicks cost £900, which is three whole months of a £300 budget before you can read the result. If you cannot afford a readable test at your bid range, that is the finding. Reach 200 clicks with no enquiry and the likeliest fault is the destination, so fix the page and the form.
For most trades, the whole £300 goes into the site and the profile, with nothing into clicks until the low end of your bid range sits under line G. For the minority whose range clears it and who work emergencies, it is the other way round.
If it would help to know which towns are reachable, send us your postcode and your three main service terms. We will say which sit inside your profile’s radius and which need a page on your own site, as a plain list with nothing attached.
Written and checked by Verithora, a one-founder web studio in East Dulwich, London SE22.
Questions
Start with the arithmetic, not the channel. Work out the gross profit one enquiry is worth to you, then multiply that by the share of visitors who enquire, counting phone calls as well as form fills. That gives your break-even cost per click. If Keyword Planner's bid range for your service term sits above it, ads lose money on the day you switch them on. If the low end of that range sits below it, ads can pay, and the honest answer is to buy clicks rather than a website that month.
Google's published UK availability page carries 28 nationwide categories, including carpenters, cleaning services, electricians, fencing, flooring, garage door, general contractor, handyman, HVAC, junk removal, landscaping, lawn care, moving, pest control, plumbers, roofers, tree services, water damage, window cleaning and window repair, plus appliance repair, carpet cleaning, worktop, foundations, home inspection, pool cleaning, pool contracting and snow removal. Read at support.google.com/localservices/answer/6224841 on 31 August 2026.
Not as a named trade. None of pressure washing, driveway cleaning, gutter cleaning, painting or decorating appears as a nationwide category on Google's published UK list, checked 31 August 2026 at support.google.com/localservices/answer/6224841. Locksmiths are named on that page, but only inside a rule excluding them from pre-badge ads, not as a UK category you can sign up under. Carpet cleaning services and cleaning services are listed, but there is no exterior cleaning category, so do not read the general cleaning label as covering a jet wash round.
Yes. Google's own page states a daily spending limit of two times your average daily budget for most campaigns on any particular day, and a monthly spending limit of 30.4 times your average daily budget in any particular month. So £300 a month is an average daily budget of about £9.87, and a single busy day can be charged at about £19.74. You set that budget for each campaign, so two campaigns means two limits rather than one.
No. Google's badge page says it is discontinuing the Money Back Guarantee associated with the Google Guarantee badge, with reimbursement requests accepted for services booked before 7 December 2025, and requests had to be submitted within 30 days of the initial service completion date. That booking cutoff passed nearly nine months ago, and the page names no country exception. The badge you can earn now is Google Verified. Google's UK availability page offers it in select verticals only, and names automotive, beauty and dining as the excluded ones, so none of the 28 UK trade categories is among them. It is not a customer guarantee.
Google does not give a date. Its Search starter guide says some changes might take effect in a few hours and others could take several months, and suggests waiting a few weeks before assessing whether your work helped. The widely repeated four months to a year figure does not appear anywhere in that guide, so we do not repeat it.
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