Module 1 · How Google's paid surfaces work

LSA vs Search: the decision rule

Time to turn the picture into a decision. By the end of this lesson you’ll have a firm, personal answer — Local Services Ads first, Search first, or both — and you’ll have reached it with an explicit rule rather than a gut feeling. There’s one decision rule, it’s short, and the rest of the lesson just walks you through applying it to your own firm.

The rule, stated flat

Here it is, then we’ll unpack every piece:

Why lead with LSA? Three reasons, all of which matter more on a small budget. You pay per lead instead of per click, so a quiet week or a page full of tire-kickers doesn’t drain you. The Google Verified badge lends you borrowed trust before anyone’s spoken to you. And LSA sits physically above everything else on the page. On a $1–3k budget, lower risk plus higher placement plus borrowed trust is a strong first dollar.

Does your category qualify?

LSA now spans 70-plus business types across home, professional, health, and more — Google adds categories without announcing them. The ones most relevant to this course:

• Lawyers — yes. Industry sources list roughly 17 eligible practice areas (bankruptcy, business, criminal, DUI, estate planning, family, immigration, personal injury, tax, and more). That exact list is industry-sourced, not one clean Google page — so treat it as a strong hint and confirm yours in-account when you start the signup.
• Accountants and tax preparers, financial planners, real estate agents — yes, with license checks.
• Healthcare-adjacent (dentists, chiropractors, optometrists, and similar) — yes, but you’ll need an NPI and malpractice insurance. One important catch: the automated junk-lead credits do not apply to healthcare, so tighten your setup extra carefully (m2 shows you how).
• The whole home-services family (HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, landscaping, and more) — yes; this is the most established group.

Who doesn’t qualify: a niche practice area outside the eligible list, and some rural or small markets where LSA simply hasn’t rolled out or has too little search volume to matter. There’s no need to guess — the honest check is to start the LSA signup and see what Google actually offers for your category and your zip. That eligibility step is a real screenshot you’ll walk through in m2.

What Search reaches that LSA can’t

Even when LSA qualifies, it doesn’t cover everything — and that’s where Search earns its place rather than competing with LSA. Search reaches:

• Specific sub-services. LSA shows you for the broad category; Search lets you bid on “contested divorce” or “S-corp election” — the exact thing someone typed.
• Neighboring towns LSA won’t cover for you but where you happily take clients.
• Searches where you want to control the message and the page — your exact ad copy, your exact landing page, tuned to one service.

When it’s both

For many firms — especially legal with a budget around $2k or more — the end state is both: LSA capturing the high-intent “head” searches at the top of the page, and Search capturing the specifics and the neighboring geography LSA misses. You don’t have to launch both at once, and you shouldn’t. LSA first (its verification takes weeks anyway, so it needs starting today), Search added once the LSA machine is running. The next lesson turns whatever you decide here into a written one-page plan.