Fix these five things before you spend a dollar on ads

Ads are rented attention. Google or Meta sends someone to your website, you pay for the visit, and then your website has one job: turn that visit into a call, a booking or an enquiry.

If the page is slow, confusing or a dead end, the ad still costs the same. You’re paying for the leak. So before you spend anything on ads, I’d fix these five things. They help every visitor, not just the paid ones.

1It’s fast on a phone

Most people who click a local ad are on their phone, often on the go. Speed shows up in the money: in a study Deloitte ran for Google across 37 brands and 30 million visits, a mobile site just 0.1 seconds faster saw 8.4% more conversions in retail and 10.1% more in travel.

Google’s yardstick is how long the main content takes to appear. It calls 2.5 seconds or less good and anything over 4 seconds poor. Test your page with Google’s free PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile result. Heavy images, too many plugins and slow hosting are the usual suspects. If the website itself is the problem, a redesign fixes it at the root.

2The page matches the ad

If your ad says “Emergency furnace repair, same day” and the click lands on a homepage about everything you’ve done since 1998, people have to hunt. Most won’t.

Send each ad to a page about that exact thing, using the same words as the ad. Google rewards it. Its Ad Rank weighs the quality of your ads and landing page, and Google says higher-quality ads can often lead to cheaper clicks. Landing page experience, how relevant and useful the page is to people who click, is one of the three parts of its Quality Score.

3The next step is obvious

Within a second or two, someone should know what to do next. Tap to call. Book a time. Get a quote. Put that action near the top of the page, repeat it further down, and make sure it works with a thumb.

Keep forms short and ask only what you need to reply. Our note on the five questions a good quote form asks is a good starting point.

4You can tell what’s working

Without tracking, you’ll never know which ads bring customers and which just bring clicks. Set up conversion tracking for what matters to you: calls from the website, form submissions and bookings. Then you can move money toward the ads that actually work.

This is the step most often skipped, and the reason so many owners say “we tried ads once and it didn’t work.” Often it did work. Nobody could tell.

5There’s proof

A stranger who has never heard of you needs a reason to trust you. Reviews do a lot of that work: in BrightLocal’s 2026 survey, 47% of people said they won’t use a business with fewer than 20 reviews. Put real proof on the page too: photos of actual work, your licences or certifications, how long you’ve been around and what happens if something goes wrong.

Bonus: reply fast

A lead from an ad is often shopping around, so the business that replies first has a head start. An automatic “Thanks, we’ve got your request, here’s what happens next” buys you time, and a quick personal follow-up wins the job.

Then start small

Once these are in place, start with a modest budget, measure for a few weeks and grow what works. Pay Google or Meta from your own account, so you can always see exactly what was spent.

What I’d do first

1. Today: run your main page through PageSpeed Insights on mobile. Over 4 seconds? That’s job one.
2. This week: make one page for the one thing you’d advertise, with a big call or book button near the top.
3. This month: set up tracking for calls, forms and bookings, and an automatic reply to every enquiry.
4. Then: a small budget, a few weeks of measuring, and more money only for what works.

We don’t run ads. We make the page worth sending people to. If you’d like to know whether yours is ready, our free website check will tell you what’s working and what’s leaking.