Ep 59 – Goodbye Leads: What Kills Your LSA Rankings

GLSA. It doesn’t have to be where your leads go to die anymore. GLSA stands for Google Local Service Ads (LSAs).

What used to be a golden ticket for lead generation has become a minefield of missed calls, dropped rankings, and Google’s ever-changing rules. We break down how LSAs actually work in 2025, what’s changed, and what you can do to get back in Google’s good graces.

In this episode of Trades Secrets, we’re serving up your blueprint for managing—and mastering—LSAs in today’s hyper-competitive landscape.

What’s In This Episode?

1. The LSA Decline: Why leads dried up overnight—and the hidden rules that may be punishing your profile
2. Missed Call Mayhem: The harsh reality of one unanswered phone ringing and what it does to your LSA standing
3. Responsiveness = Ranking: How fast and detailed you respond to LSA inquiries directly impacts visibility

Devon Hayes:
Hello, hello, hello.
Amanda Joyce:
Yes, we are back with another really exciting topic, and one that probably speaks to most of you. We talk to contractors all the time that are trying to solve the puzzle that is Google Local Service Ads, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. So we’ll hop in and talk to you about some of the recent changes we’ve seen, speak to some pain points, and give you some good tips on how you can make sure that you’re getting the very most out of your investment.
Devon Hayes:
Let’s go.
Welcome to Trade Secrets, where we demystify digital marketing to help contractors get the most bang for their marketing bucks.
Amanda Joyce:
This is for you if you’re a contractor looking for actionable marketing insights.
Devon Hayes:
Learn from home services industry experts to elevate your business through simplified marketing strategies.
Amanda Joyce:
Let’s dive into today’s trade secret.
Devon Hayes:
Oh my gosh, LSA, all day. LSA, Google Guaranteed, Google Local Service Ads. You’ve heard of them. They were the best lead source forever. If you can still get them, they are. But every Tommy Mello group, every Facebook group, everyone is seeing a lot of pain points with this what used to be good old-fashioned honeypot. Amanda.
Amanda Joyce:
Yes.
Devon Hayes:
This is like your world. You’ve seen it all. You’ve pulled the toggles, levers, switches, buttons, languages.
Amanda Joyce:
Read the forums. Yeah, exactly. Looked for the hidden honeypot in there, because unlike Google Ads that there’s a million levers and a million ways you can optimize and tweak and you name it, LSA is kind of like Google Ads with training wheels on it.
So real quickly, for most of you, most you know what it is, but we’re just going to assume that maybe a couple of you might not. Local Service Ads are those ads that are now popping up at the very top of the search results above even Google Ads, typically even above the Local 3-Pack. And then Google Ads is taking a backseat to them, especially for search terms for contractors.
Devon Hayes:
And they have that little green shield that says, "Google Guaranteed." Those are the ads we’re talking about.
Amanda Joyce:
Yes. You don’t click through to a website, you just click… You can see their little profile. You can call them or message them. There’s no landing page. It’s a very basic ad medium. And for years, it started out where it was kind of this little hidden secret that a lot of people didn’t know about and it was gold. And then now everybody knows about it, just the way once upon a time Google Ads was gold and everybody got in there.
So now that it’s a bit more saturated, you might be feeling the pain that we’ve seen in Tommy Mello’s group, that we’ve heard from contractors directly. Maybe it was a huge lead source for you for a really long time. Your admin just happened to step away from her desk or his desk for three minutes and miss a call, and all of a sudden-
Devon Hayes:
Crickets.
Amanda Joyce:
… you just see it all disappear. We’ve seen it with one of our longstanding best clients who killed it forever, and they missed a call the 20th of December. Why is Google even grading any of us on the 20th of December? We’re all checked out. Missed a call that day. They missed a call in early January. And as soon as they missed that second call, there was immediate another missed call. And it was from Google Local Services specifically to check and catch them not answering their phone.
And we went from averaging about $4,000 a month in spend, and I’m talking for $75 calls that were actual leads, to like we get excited if their phone rings three times a month. It sucks.
Devon Hayes:
Oh.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. And a lot of you guys are probably feeling that pain. Or maybe you never even got to ride that wave that was the sweet spot where your phone just didn’t stop ringing. So that’s what we’re here to talk about today, to first of all tell you that we hear you and you’re not alone, but kind of talk about some of the best practices you can follow if your phone is ringing, or even if it’s barely ringing. There’s no rule that says that you couldn’t get back in Google’s good graces, but you just have to stay the course.
Devon Hayes:
I was going to say with this, you said just like Google Ads used to be, like a sweet honeypot. I think we explained, you did a great job explaining the difference between Local Service Ads and ads. Maybe I’m totally, totally derailing us here for a second. But this is even different than I think now everyone’s starting to see those sponsored ads in the AI summary overview. Those are not part of Google Local Service Ads. Those are Google Ads, and we’re talking about just the little green shield.
Amanda Joyce:
Just the green shield.
Devon Hayes:
And those don’t appear in the AI summary overview. Those are traditional Google Ads.
Amanda Joyce:
Yes.
Devon Hayes:
Okay. I wasn’t sure which ones were there.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. So the LSA ads are the ones that Google, for local service terms, for most of the terms any of you guys want to rank for, Google gives that top spot to those Local Service Ads. And one of the things that’s very different about this is you can go in and pick the categories you want to show up for, but you do not get to tell them what keyword you want to show up. You just are at their mercy. You go in and you check the category. Depending on your market, and most markets, then you have to prove that you have the proper licensing for it if that’s required in your local municipality. If you’re a roofer and your local municipality requires a roofing license, you will have to upload it to be able to say you’re a roofer. You have to do a background check. Part of the reason that that Google guarantee is so good is that Google is saying, "We ran a background check. We know who these people are." They do a background check on one of the business owners, and then they also look up all your licensure.
So once you opt into that category though, all bets are off. You don’t know what keywords you’re showing up for unless you’re just got all the time in the world on your hands and you’re just Googling it and seeing what you show up for. And again, Google, if you have a high quality score because you’re not missing phone calls and Google likes you, they’re going to show you for a lot more of those searches. But you have no control over what searches. I miss the old days with Google Ads when I could just say, "I want to show up for roofing contractor near me in this zip code." We can still bid on it, and in the different hours of the day where Google isn’t… I mean, sometimes we do get a higher click-through rate on weekends and evenings when there aren’t as many people bidding on the… Because some people only run LSA during business hours. But that’s when people are actively making choices and searching a contractor in their space during normal business hours is the honey spot.
So anyway, that is what LSA is. But a couple of things to keep in mind with it. One of the reasons it’s so great is because you only pay for lead. You’re not paying for clicks like we do in Google Ads. So for certain service terms, we’re paying 50, 75, $100 for the click, and there’s no guarantee someone’s going to take action when they hit your landing page. A 10% conversion rate is considered pretty healthy. So if you’re paying $50 per click and you need 10 clicks to get one conversion, you’re looking at $500 a conversion. In LSA right now, in even expensive markets, we might pay 120 for the phone call. So it’s still more cost-effective than Google Ads, but we’re all vying for that little bit of space, little bit of inventory.
But the nice thing is you can dispute them. So if you get in there and someone’s calling and trying to get a job or pay a bill, you can go in and dispute it and Google will credit you back the expenditure on that particular call. So it’s no wonder it’s a no-brainer for a lot of people. They don’t need an agency to run it because they don’t have to know how to pick keywords and do all the things you have to do inside of Google Ads. But what you do have to do is babysit it.
And so that’s one of the things that we as an agency are always training our clients on. We try to help a lot in the management of the account, but at the end of the day, we need them to help us. We need to know… We can only hear what happened on that phone call. Did they actually go ahead and book? Did you give them an estimate? There’s all this information on the back end that you can add to the account so that Google knows you’re actively in there, and then they reward you with more phone calls.
And at the end of the day, Google is data mining. So they want to know, they literally have the nerve to ask you what the estimate was for, if they booked it, what date they booked it on. But like any Google product, they reward you for filling out every last box.
Devon Hayes:
Okay. So that’s what I was going to ask. I’m like, so what does… We’ll cover two things here. Let’s cover how to optimize the profile, everything that you can do. And then the other question, the other end of this is going to be what can you do if you’ve missed a call?
So let’s start with what can you do to… Okay, you’ve uploaded your insurance. You finally got approved. What can you do to get in Google’s good graces, get your quality score up there so that your ad gets served? What can someone do? What’s a fully optimized profile look like?
Amanda Joyce:
Well, it all actually does start with your Google business profile, because you can’t even have an LSA account anymore without your Google business profile, and they pull your reviews over into Google Local Service Ads.
Devon Hayes:
Is that complete now? Because some markets, I feel like they are the same reviews, and I just talked to someone yesterday where they had their numbers for LSA versus GBP were off, but I know that this is recent, where they just started merging reviews into LSA.
Amanda Joyce:
Well, yeah, it used to be a hybrid of both. So if you got a review through your LSA profile, it would always live in LSA and it would never hit your GBP, but if it hit GBP, it would feed through. And January was when they made the new policy that you couldn’t even have an LSA account at all without a Google business profile. Before January, you could still just start a Google Local Service Ads account. I don’t know why you would and not have a GBP, but people could do it.
So that is interesting. I would be interested to click around and see why that was happening for those particular folks, because that’s pretty unusual anymore. It’s typically pretty-
Devon Hayes:
Yeah, they’re friends in Louisiana.
Amanda Joyce:
Pretty lined up.
Devon Hayes:
Our plumbers down south in Louisiana.
Amanda Joyce:
Down south.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah.
Amanda Joyce:
So yeah, I’d be curious. But for the most part, since January I’ve seen them be pretty consistent. But there could still be some of that legacy happening where maybe they got a few reviews only from LSA that Google will not show on their GBP. But now anymore if you get one, it goes both places.
But at the end of the day, just like with local, there’s no such thing as enough reviews. So if you’re continuing to get reviews on your GBP, it’s going to float the LSA boat as well.
Devon Hayes:
Okay.
Amanda Joyce:
Additionally, inside your profile, every category you click in, then you’re given the option to select from a canned list of like… There’s probably like 20 of them, depending on the service, that you can check. It’s like locally owned, family owned, warranties, that kind of thing. So you always want to make sure you’re using all six that they’ll allow you to have for each category.
And keep going in there and tweaking it too. So maybe one week you run locally owned and operated. The next week you try family owned. You want to show Google you’re in there touching it. But you can also go into the search results and see what your biggest competitors that are ranking for, what descriptions they’ve checked and kind of use that as a little bit of a cheat sheet too to see, okay, what does Google seem to be favoring in my market?
Most of the information on it just comes from your GBP. You want to make sure… If you change your address on your GBP, you want to call LSA and let them know immediately because it can impact the health of your account if they don’t match. But so most of that’s pretty straightforward.
And then further down in your profile, you can include your hours. You can say whether you want your ads to serve 24 hours a day or only during business hours. Unless you have a good answering service that’s never going to miss a call, even at 10:30 on a Friday night, you shouldn’t run 24/7. In every competitive market, I tell our clients to, but I tell them to make sure that they are ready to capture that phone call.
Okay. So I’m just working my way down in my head of the whole profile. So you want to make sure your hours are correct. Decide if you’re going to have it on 24/7. Fully commit to whatever you tell Google, and don’t ever miss a call. You can opt in or out of messaging. They obviously want you to take messaging. They want you to just say yes to everything they’re offering you. But again, you have to be really responsive in messaging. And I’ve got a nuance about some AI that they’ve just rolled out, but I’ll finish talking through how to optimize your profile and then I’ve got this… This was one of the reasons I really wanted to do this today because we just saw an anomaly that’s that Google’s just rolled out.
Additionally, photos. They will allow… I can’t even remember how many photos, but we as a rule as an agency, as soon as we take over a GLSA, we go in there and max it out. There is a number you will hit where it will stop taking your photos, and we put that many photos in. We make sure they’re good. They’re a good combination of photos from the GBP, from social media that show faces, show that you are a real company in the community out there swinging the hammer.
Devon Hayes:
With logo on shirt.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, you’re not some AI or lead aggregator or whatever. So you fully maximize out those photos. And then also your budget. So we are trying to get phone calls in San Antonio, which is one of the toughest markets in the country. And we know from some friendly competition that the guy that owns the space right now literally has his set on $999,999. So $1 shy of a million. I think that’s as high as they’ll let you set it.
Devon Hayes:
It’s asking a lot, to go to a million. It might break the bank there.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, exactly. And the funny thing is probably even on a good week… Because people, they’re so good, people want the leads. They’re like, "Take my money." Probably on a very busy week for that guy, he’s spending between 7 and $10,000. And I know for a lot of you, you’re like, "Oh my gosh." But if you were spending 7 to $10,000 and consistently spending like $150 per actually good lead, you’d probably say, "Take my money all day."
Anyway, set a really high budget. I’ve read things in different forums that say not to, but it’s really testing. You can keep playing with it, but definitely look at that and make sure you’re at least setting an aggressive budget, even if you’re setting it for like five grand a week. Make sure you’re showing Google you mean business. And then they also have the option to either set your own bid or to let them set the bid for you.
Also, I get mixed messaging. I’ve read in forums to do it yourself. I’ve read in forums not too. I’ve had Google reps tell me both sides. So it’s another one to test, but make sure you’re either letting them set your bid or you’re being real aggressive with your bid. Say you’ll pay $200 a lead, hoping that Google will take you seriously.
Devon Hayes:
That makes me wonder, you said, and I know that you’re on the phone with a Google rep all the time for everybody because we’re running Google Ads, is there a Google rep for LSA that maybe reaches out to these businesses and tries to get them to opt into certain things, or is there not?
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, in my experience, there is not. I’m sure you’ve all had aggressive Google reps calling you. For LSA, they have a phone number, and sometimes during off hours when you’re nearing the end of the day on the East Coast, they want to force you into a chat. But for the most part, you can actually call and get someone on the phone at LSA during normal business hours in the US. And then those people will give you information.
But once you’ve done it for a while, even when you’re talking to the person, it’s evident whether they know what they’re talking about or they’re reading to you off a script. But they all have different experiences. And so I’ve talked to some that are like, "Oh no, don’t use maximize the max bid. You should set your own." So I did that for a little while.
Devon Hayes:
I’m glad you’re touching on this because I try to be helpful and answer questions sometimes in a lot of those Facebook groups, and that was one of the… So there was a whole question about a guy who’s like, "I don’t know what was going on." His LSA was underperforming. He was asking for a contact there. And then of course, I just went through the gamut of all of the comments in there, because it’s a huge group so there’s tons of comments. Someone said, and I would love you to weigh in on this, that if you… "You got to pay to play. If you’re only doing LSA and not pairing PPC or PMax, you’ll only get breadcrumbs." What are your thoughts on that?
Amanda Joyce:
That’s really interesting because we have a dedicated Google rep on a couple of our accounts, and he knows his stuff inside and out, and he literally never talks to me about LSA. I bring it up and talk to him about it, and he’s like, "Not my circus, not my monkeys." He does not give me any service on it. So maybe I need to push harder and ask him if there’s something there, but I’ve never been able to get them… Because it’s his job to get you to spend in Google Ads. They kind of look down on LSA at Google Ads.
Devon Hayes:
Oh, so they wouldn’t tell you anyway. But yeah, so maybe that’s an experiment of upping your PPCs. But then again, because remember old-timey, they said that, "Oh, PPC doesn’t float your ranking on organic results in Google." And then the leak happened last May where it was, "Actually, okay, it does have a weight on your organic positioning."
So I wonder… It’s like anything that we say, right? Any Google product, YouTube, GBP, LSA, Google Ads, the Display Network, payment, we’re kidding ourselves if we don’t think that you’re rewarded for playing in the Google sandbox and staying in the Google sandbox, right?
Amanda Joyce:
Exactly.
Devon Hayes:
But to prove that is something else. I guess it would just be experimenting. But that is interesting that the Google Ads reps are like, "Ew."
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, they won’t give me any direct service on it, but there’s some cases in which we’re running a Google Ad account that shares the same account number as an LSA account, and so maybe there’s an argument to be made that if Google can tie the spin that’s happening in Google Ads. But nonetheless, there is a phone number you can call and somebody will pick it up and talk to you about it. That’s something to really keep in mind if your insurance ever lapses and you’ve just uploaded it, you don’t have to wait three to four or five days for them to process it. You can just call and be a squeaky wheel and just wait on hold and say, "I’d like you guys to review my insurance. I just uploaded it." And you’ll be back live that same day. But you just have to call and talk to somebody.
So that’s my favorite thing about it is that there’s support there available to you. Anytime I do have a question about the account, it takes me 15 minutes. I get on hold and I do something else while I wait to hear from them.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah. And just for anyone listening, I do have that phone number right here if you’d like it. 844-263-9884. So if you need to get ahold of them, Google Guaranteed support is 844-263-9884.
Yeah, this is all interesting because I think everyone maybe now in the home services world, they know about LSA, but it’s that now the question is, like our client who missed a call, now what? What do you do if you miss a call? What can be done? And you’ve gone through a lot of testing to try to right the ship on this. So it ain’t for lack of trying, I know that.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, so it’s tough. In one market, we just threw away an account and started a new one because we’re like, "This is San Antonio. It’s so tough." And that’s kind of worked. The phone has starting to ring. But they were another one that for the longest time, we were taking it for granted. And they weren’t getting a ton, but I’d say they probably spent about 1,500 to $3,000 a month. They were legit leads. You can’t argue with that. And then they missed a couple calls. And so we’ve since completely started a new profile for them, which any of you have looked at any forums are probably finding people that say they do that. That does seem to be a regular practice for some folks.
But additionally, you just need to be in there. If somebody does call you, get in there immediately. Put every piece of information they’re asking for. They’re asking for name, they’re asking for email address, they’re asking if they booked. Sometimes we’re listening to the calls for our clients, and then they take the phone conversation offline. They say, "I’m going to have my sales guy get back to you," if they’re maybe far away and wanting to ask about a specific siding repair. And then we lose it from there. So we as the agency can’t go in and say if it booked.
So you have to either get in there yourself or communicate it to whoever’s managing it and fill out all of that information. At the end of the day, Google’s trying to data mine. So the more information you’re giving them so they can be successful in that effort… Because they want to know what all of our buying behavior is. And if they want to know if I’m reaching out through LSA and then I reach out and book and then spend $50,000 on re-siding my house, they’re going to serve me different ads than they’re going to serve somebody who maybe does a $500 repair. So they’re literally trying to learn our online buying behaviors and they need us to tell them that information.
Devon Hayes:
So with that, that makes me wonder from what we know on the organic side of things in how engagement is a ranking factor, and one of the ways Google measures engagement is our responsiveness, which is, it seems to be, the same case with LSA. Like responsive, answer the phone, like the ear engagement. And on reviews we will… And we advise all our clients, everybody. You respond to reviews as quickly as possible. I’m wondering if after you get a phone call in LSA, do you think the same could be said for how responsive you are inside of the LSA platform from like time of phone call to the time you fill out the info? Could that potentially… I mean, I guess we don’t know because they won’t tell us, but maybe that’s something.
Amanda Joyce:
It’s true.
Devon Hayes:
Like someone who’s trying to control it and trying to feed the Google machine. Because Google has quality raters, actual people, that’s their job. A QR, a quality rater. And I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of components that go into a brand or an entity’s overall quality score. How many Google products are they using, and how engaged are they? How responsive are they? Maybe all of that lends itself. So if they look at how quickly you’re entering information in the backend of LSA, that’s something you can control. You can’t control how many times you’re served, but you can control how quickly you enter that info.
Amanda Joyce:
Exactly.
Devon Hayes:
I wonder if that’s something they would consider.
Amanda Joyce:
It’s definitely worth considering. And I can tell you as an agency, we can’t do it ever as perfectly as the person on the ground there can. So that’s one of the things we run into with… And we get into like this time of year where so many people are so busy. Some of our clients that are all over it in slow season, now we’re begging them to tell us like, "Did it book? Did you send an estimate? What’s going on?"
So I would encourage you as a business owner, if you’re listening to this, to run your own tests there and do it in real time. So we do have some clients that their admin will just pull it up and enter it as they’re throwing the person in their CRM, but we just don’t have a true A-B test because there’s never a real consistency with when that’s happening. But it’s definitely worth considering. It’s definitely worth testing.
The other thing that I really wanted to make sure that we talked about today was something that we just started noticing. We have some clients who build decks, and there is not currently a deck category. There is a patios and decks category under GC, under general contractor. So to run on those, you have to upload a general contractor’s license, and we can opt in, and I can literally just check the box that says patios and decks and nothing else in it. But what we started noticing was when you had messaging turned on, our clients were getting these… Google was asking automated questions that were obviously making them look incompetent to the potential customer, because they’re saying they want a deck or a patio, and it was literally asking, "What’s the square footage of your home? How many rooms do you have?" Or, "How many rooms are impacted?"
Me, I’d be like, "Mayday. I’m out of here. I wasn’t planning on letting you in my house. I wanted you to come build a deck."
So we were getting these… We caught it really quick, the client caught it, we caught it, and we could narrow it down. At first I was like, "Oh my gosh, we just have to turn off… What is going on here?" And we were able to narrow it down. They’re only currently doing it inside of the GC category. That doesn’t mean three months from now they’re not going to be asking automated questions inside of roofing or wherever, you name it.
So it’s just something we really encourage all of you to watch. Because that’s just going to put a bad taste in people’s mouths, and it felt really gross and a huge overreach on Google’s part to start doing that. And there was no way other than just completely turning off messaging to do that. And it’s from this thing when you turn messaging on now, when you go into GC, there is this button you can now push that says, "Instant quote," and that’s where it’s coming from. Or, "Get a quote," and that’s when it starts asking all these qualifying questions. And Google’s just getting a little ahead of itself. So they could refine the questions here in a while, but…
Devon Hayes:
Pause for the cause. Shameless plug. We caught that because we listen to every single call for our clients, whether it’s like LSA or an organic phone call. So, shout out to the team for listening, and shameless plug for Elevation Marketing, where we listen to every single call, and that’s why we have call tracking so we can look at the quality of the calls. Ting. Okay, back to your regularly scheduled programming on LSA.
Amanda Joyce:
To your program.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah, so that’s great that it was caught really quickly, and obviously the client’s going to hear that firsthand when it’s asking some very intrusive questions for a deck.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah.
Devon Hayes:
Gosh, that’s crazy.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, so needless to say, we just turned it off for now. And we’ll keep an eye on it. But now I’m hyper aware of anyone we have messaging turned on for that we could just overnight start seeing AI questions asked. So it’s just a good thing to keep an eye on.
And the other thing I wanted to just say that most people that have run it for a while understand this, but you have to listen to the phone calls. You have to. And for the longest time, we took certain clients on that we’re like, "Oh my God, this has been running for a year and a half and no one’s listened to these calls." And only until the last eight months has Google been automatically disputing some of the junk calls. Before that, if you didn’t dispute it, Google just took your money. So people paying for… Even in a good market, 20% of them are junk, and no one was in there disputing them. You’re just flushing money down the toilet. So at least they do more of it now, but you have to listen to it.
And it’s also great as the business owner for quality control. It doesn’t take that long. They’re pretty quick phone calls, and you can quickly figure out like, oh, this one admin is really missing the mark, or she’s taking no for an answer too easily, or whatever. It’s a great way to quickly coach whoever’s on the other end of that phone. And also to hear pain points that are maybe coming in that you could maybe tell your content team to write about because you’re realizing that everyone’s calling in saying that their deck got hammered by hail last summer and they need to fix it. Time to write a blog post on it.
So it all feeds into it to each other, but listening to them is critical. And if you as a business owner can’t do it, somebody who is super trusted and high up in the company who deals with your sales team should be listening to it. And even listen to the ones that are not charged, because that’s how you now find if you missed a call. Because they won’t charge you for the missed call. So you might be like, "We never missed anything. Where’d all of our leads go?" But if you go over to the tab where you can sort by different type of lead, if you sort for not charged and then you go listen to those, you might real quickly figure out that Sammy at the front desk takes two hour lunch every day and misses phone calls. Hot tip.
Devon Hayes:
Oh, Sammy might get fired if Sammy is the reason you don’t get those LSA calls anymore, because it is an uphill battle to recover. But it sounds like there’s some experimenting you can do if you miss them. Experiment with PPC, experiment with maybe a little bit of that, at least running it on your brand. Those clicks are usually cheaper than running the Service Plus location terms. That sounds like a possible solution, your responsiveness for if you do get a call inside of the platform, maybe that’s something you can do. Always getting more reviews and responding to those reviews right away. And I think reviews with images are even better. And then responding to those right away using your company name and the service and your review responses as quickly as possible.
And that responsiveness, just think, Google wants all of the users to have a good experience. Not getting an answer is not a good experience because they don’t make any money off of it, so that’s also the other side of the coin. Yeah, responsiveness is a good user experience, and that engagement metric, it’s part of your organic ranking. So I would imagine it has to be part of your LSA kind of rotation as well.
Amanda Joyce:
Absolutely. It totally is. And then just also keep in mind that going in right when the call came in isn’t enough. If you go in and say, "Philip Bard," I’m looking at one right now, "in Nashville called in on a siding call and booked." You got to go back after you go out and finish it up. They literally want you to tell them… They’re asking for customer name, customer email, notes. So we always do that. You can rate the lead, which is really important to do too. So you’re letting them know this is good. You can mark it as booked. And then inside it, you can either click "Already completed," give the name and the price estimate and the job type or upcoming. But it’s not just immediately when the call comes in. Go back in. Just the way you’d update your CRM, update it in here. And Google is going to reward you for it because they want to know how much Philip Bard spent on his new roof.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah, I think… Well, this is really good info, and I think this is a hot topic. This is something that a lot of people are asking about. Because it did used to be the best lead source and it sucks to lose it, but there’s no secret dance you can do to get back in their good graces, or to even get in their good graces in the first place, other than continuously be responsive and never, ever miss a call.
Amanda Joyce:
Never.
Devon Hayes:
Never. So yeah, hopefully, I know people got a ton of value out of this just based off of every forum, everyone asking about LSA and what they can do. So you’ve got some options, but make sure you fully exhaust touching every nook, cranny, uploading every possible photo, everything you can, you’re as engaged and responsive as possible. And if that fails, after doing that for six months and you still don’t get one single phone call, start over again. I mean, that’s what we have seen and that’s what we’ve had to do. And that’s starting to get the phone to ring again. So I think that’s good intel from some sweat equity over here with some of our poor clients. [inaudible 00:31:38].
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, exactly. And then just keep your ears around because Google really might… I mean, they change stuff all the time. They’re in the business of making money. They know we’re all vying for those three spots. Before you know it, there’s going to be six of them, where they’re going to figure out a way to mix it in with the local… They’re going to find ways to keep adding more inventory so more of us can get it. But half the reason it’s so valuable right now is because there’s only three choices. So it makes it way… The likelihood someone is going to convert on you is much higher. So we’ll keep bringing the topic up here as we see things unfold, but just know that just because you cracked the code this month doesn’t mean you’ve cracked it forever. So just don’t sleep on it.
Devon Hayes:
Godspeed.
Amanda Joyce:
That was today’s trade secret. Thanks for listening.
Devon Hayes:
Did you find this helpful? We’re just getting started.
Amanda Joyce:
Subscribe, and don’t miss our next reveal.
Devon Hayes:
Until next time.