- 01
Sort the searches by what the person wants
“Emergency plumber Richmond” is a customer. “How to unblock a drain” is a reader. One becomes a keyword, the other becomes a negative before it costs you a cent. Every term we find gets put in one bucket or the other, on purpose.
- 02
Choose the match settings deliberately
Every keyword gets a setting chosen for what that term has already proved, rather than one blanket setting rolled across the account. The looser settings have to earn their place with real conversion data and a negative list strong enough to hold them.
- 03
Start with the trade's negative pack
Plumbing, electrical and cleaning each have a starter pack of negatives, built from the junk earlier accounts paid for. A new campaign in that trade opens with it. You are not paying to learn what we already know.
- 04
Build the structure around the search
Built tight enough that the keyword, the ad and the page all say the same thing. That alignment is most of what Quality Score is measuring, and Quality Score is what decides whether you pay more or less than the business beside you.
- 05
Write the ads for the search
Fifteen headlines and four descriptions, written for the search rather than lifted from your homepage. Anything that has to stay exact — a licence number, a legal line, an offer — is held in place, and the rest is left free for Google to test. Then we read what Google served, which is rarely what we expected.
- 06
Fill every asset
Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call, location, price and lead-form assets. Each one is more of the page occupied by you and less by whoever is bidding against you.
- 07
Set geography and hours honestly
Presence targeting, so you pay for people who are actually in your service area rather than people reading about it. Suburb, postcode or radius. And an ad schedule that matches when somebody answers the phone.
- 08
Track each conversion as itself
We count calls over sixty seconds, form submissions, bookings, live chats and purchases separately, and put a value on each. Until somebody gets that right, the bidding chases whatever is cheapest, and cheap is rarely the job you wanted.
- 09
Clean the search terms every working day
We read what people typed, negate the waste, and give the terms that produced customers a place of their own. It is the least glamorous job on the account and the biggest single lever on cost per job.
- 10
Move the bidding when the data earns it
Manual CPC while a brand-new account has nothing to learn from — that is not a preference, it is what works — then a conversion-based strategy once there is enough history to trust it. Budget follows whatever is producing customers this month.
