Branded Google Ads for Local Business: When to Use & Avoid

When branded Google advertising for Local Business brings benefits, and when it just wastes your budget. We analyze in which cases it actually works, and when it’s better to avoid launching it.

We will not be considering advertising in media and on third-party sites — our focus is exclusively on advertising in Google Search.

Specifically, on promoting your business through search queries directly related to your company. For example, such as:

• Company name, brand
• Website address, domain
• Names of key employees

Let’s imagine a situation where you don’t place branded advertising – where would you appear in the regular (organic) search results?

When a user enters a query related to your brand in Google, search results typically appear as follows:

• Ads, Local Pack (Google Maps)
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) block
  
• And only after that do the search results for your brand query begin
  

In the Local Pack, advertisements can also be displayed, and they are typically always positioned above organic results. This means that even if your business is present in local search, competitors’ ads can occupy the top positions, attracting the main attention of users.

Now imagine that you have worked very hard, spent significant money on organic search promotion, but ultimately your potential clients went to a competitor through advertising in Search or the Local Pack, which are always positioned above organic results.

Organic results + Google Ads.

With this combination, we increase the amount of information that users see about us when they perform a search query for our brand. Users can either click on the ad or on the organic result, but in either case, they will still navigate to your brand’s website.

With branded advertising, you increase control over where users go when they are looking for information about your brand. In organic results, there might not only be your brand’s website but also various review sites or irrelevant websites that you wouldn’t want your potential clients to visit.

By combining organic results and advertising in Google Ads, we significantly increase the chances that users will choose us rather than going to competitors. This approach allows us to occupy more screen space in search results, enhancing our visibility.

Another company can set up advertising in such a way that Google will consider it relevant to your brand. As a result, users searching for information about your company may see not only your website in the results but also competitors’ ads with similar keywords.

You can conduct an experiment by searching for your company name for some time, and soon you will start to notice that in search results, within the advertising block, Google may display your competitors. This doesn’t mean they are doing it deliberately, but nevertheless, such a strategy exists and is called “launching ads for competitors’ queries.”

Imagine that you work hard, invest money in promotion, in your work, in your expertise, and your competitors come along and position themselves above you in search results thanks to branded advertising. You simply lose potential clients.

Based on our experience, if advertising is properly configured, it typically cannot cost more than 8–10% of the total advertising budget.

This occurs because Google’s search advertising is based on the principle of “relevance.” When we launch branded advertising, the cost per click for us will be significantly lower, as branded search queries have maximum relevance for our business. This means that Google evaluates our ads as the most suitable for such queries, reducing the price per click and improving the effectiveness of the advertising campaign.

For example, if your company is called “the plumber,” “boston hvac,” “cheap,” “plumbers,” “pest masters,” and so on. These are overly generic queries that are very similar to commonly used words.

From Google’s perspective, such advertising will be perceived by algorithms not as branded, but as general advertising, which will affect the cost, and the conversion rate will be lower than in branded advertising. This happens because the company name consists of commonly used words that are not associated with a specific company name.

The simplest example is related to residential locksmith, auto locksmith, that is, those services for which a person has an immediate need, and most often they don’t care which company provides the service; what’s more important to them is that the service contract is fulfilled as quickly as possible and for a reasonable price.

A person walks outside, the door slams shut, and they urgently need to solve the problem. In such a situation, the brand doesn’t matter — it’s important to simply find the nearest specialist who can quickly help them get back home. They won’t remember the name of the company seen in the advertisement, and in a repeat situation, they will likely search for “locksmith near me” or a similar query.

However, if a locksmith company operates in the commercial or B2B sector, launching advertising may be more justified. In such cases, clients make decisions consciously, choosing a reliable partner for long-term cooperation. For such companies, a B2B marketing Google approach may be useful, which takes into account the specifics of working with corporate clients.

All the problems described in the article are exclusively from our practice, which we have personally encountered.

Effective call handling is a key element of success in the Home Repair business. We have examined the main problems faced by local companies in the USA and proposed solutions that allow you not to lose clients.