Service
Google Ads for garages: the quickest door, and the easiest to waste money on
An ad puts you above the map for “MOT near me” this afternoon. Left on Google's default settings it also puts you above the map for “mechanic jobs”, “how to change brake pads” and searches from three counties away. We run search ads only, in your postcodes, on the terms that book, with every call counted.
When we say no to ads
Three situations where the money is better spent elsewhere
- The profile is broken. Wrong category, no hours, three reviews. Fixing that costs nothing and moves the map, which is where the MOT searches go anyway.
- The site cannot convert. Six seconds to load, no booking route, a form that goes nowhere. Ads to that page are money set on fire. Landing pages first.
- The bays are already full. Ads bring more of the same routine work. If what you want is better work, not more, the answer is pages and reviews, not clicks.
When ads earn their keep
Deadline searches and the gap before SEO pays
- “MOT today”, “MOT near me”, “car service [town]”. A driver with a date, booking the first credible result.
- A specialist job with thin competition. DPF cleaning, remapping, EV servicing in a town where nobody else is advertising it.
- Months one to four of an SEO campaign, while the profile, pages and reviews build. Then the budget comes down as organic bookings arrive.
- Testing a new service before committing a bay and a page to it.
How the account is built
Search only, tight radius, one page per ad group
- One campaign per intent: MOT, servicing, repairs, specialist. No “smart” campaign, no display, no YouTube.
- Postcode targeting drawn around where bookings actually come from, reviewed monthly against the call log.
- Each ad group lands on the matching page: the MOT ad on the MOT page, never the homepage.
- Hours-of-day scheduling that matches when the desk answers, because an unanswered call is a click you paid for.
- Call tracking and booking tracking wired before the first pound is spent.
- Your account, your card, your data. We manage; you own.
The negative list we start with
Words that appear in searches garages pay for and never book from. Added on day one, extended every week from the search-term report.
- jobs
- vacancies
- apprenticeship
- salary
- course
- training
- diy
- how to
- manual
- parts
- for sale
- wholesale
- insurance
- warranty claim
Ads and SEO together
Same pages, same tracking, opposite timelines
Ads deliver this week and stop when you stop. SEO takes a season and keeps going. They share the landing pages, so the work on one improves the other: pages built for SEO raise the quality score of the ads that land on them, and the ad search-term report shows which jobs are worth a page. The sequence we recommend is fix, then ads for the deadline searches, then scale the ads back as the map and the pages take over. Management is quoted with the SEO tiers.
Questions garage owners ask us
What about adverts in ChatGPT?
Not yet available to a UK garage in any form we could measure. When it is, we test it like any channel: small spend, tracked calls and bookings, a verdict in plain numbers. Being named in the free answers, which is on our AEO page, is the part worth doing now.
How much should a garage put into Google Ads?
Enough for the campaign to learn: in most UK towns a few hundred pounds a month to Google, on top of the management fee. Below that it never settles into anything measurable. We set the figure with you from the actual searches in your postcodes.
Will ads work if our website is poor?
No, and we will not run them on it. Ads send drivers to a page; if the page is slow or says nothing, the money is spent and the phone stays quiet. We fix the profile and the landing pages first, then switch ads on.
What do you charge to manage them?
It is quoted with your SEO tier, because ads and SEO share landing pages and tracking. Ad spend goes to Google on your card, in your account, which you own. We never hold or mark up the money.
Do you do Local Services Ads?
Where Google offers them for garages in your area, yes. They sit above everything else, charge per lead rather than per click, and need the business verified. We handle set-up and dispute the junk leads.
How do we know what a booking cost?
Every call and booking is tracked back to the search that produced it. The monthly report shows searches, clicks, calls, bookings and cost per booking, and the terms we cut that month.
Ask whether ads make sense for your garage yet
Tell us your town and the work you want. We check the searches and the competition and say whether ads, SEO, or both, and in which order.