If you can get approved for Local Service Ads, start there. They sit above everything else, you pay per lead instead of per click, and the Google Guaranteed badge does a lot of selling in a trade where trust is short.
Then add Google search ads for the gaps. Here is how the two actually differ.
Local Service Ads
These are the listings at the very top with the green check badge. You pay for a lead, not a click, so a click that never becomes a call costs you nothing.
What is good: the position, the badge, and the pricing model. For a locksmith the badge matters more than it does for most trades, because your customers have read the horror stories about $19 quotes turning into $400 bills.
What is hard: getting in. Google runs a licence check and a background check. That is exactly why the badge is worth something, but it means paperwork and a wait.
What to watch: dispute the junk leads. Wrong numbers, people looking for a different service, calls from outside your area — you can contest all of those and most shops never do.
Google search ads
The classic text ads. You pay per click and you control everything.
What is good: reach and precision. You choose the exact keywords, the hours, the radius, and the page each ad points at. Local Service Ads give you none of that.
What is hard: it is easy to waste money. Almost every locksmith account we take over is burning budget on "locksmith school", "locksmith jobs" and "how to pick a lock" because nobody built a negative keyword list.
What to watch: click fraud. Competitors click your ads to drain your daily budget so theirs is the only one showing by lunch. It is not a rare edge case in this trade. Check for repeat IPs and clicks that never convert.
The honest comparison
| Local Service Ads | Search Ads | |
|---|---|---|
| You pay for | A lead | A click |
| Position | Above everything | Below LSAs |
| Setup | Licence + background check | Same day |
| Control | Very little | Total |
| Trust signal | Google Guaranteed badge | None |
| Wasted spend risk | Low | High if unmanaged |
What we usually do
Get Local Service Ads approved first, because the cost per lead is normally the lowest of anything available to a locksmith.
Then run a tight search campaign underneath it, aimed only at emergency intent — "locked out", "car key replacement", "24 hour locksmith near me". Call-only ad formats, so a tap dials you instead of loading a page.
Point every ad group at a page built for that service, never the home page. That single change usually does more for cost per call than any bid adjustment.
And the goal is to need them less
Ads are rented traffic. The day the card stops working, the calls stop.
One of our longest clients ran ads hard through year one, then switched them off completely because organic traffic had outgrown what the ads were bringing. His call volume still went up.
That is the plan: use ads to cover the gap while rankings build underneath, then turn the tap down.