LSAs Dominate, AI Failures, Common Local SEO Mistakes

LSAs Are Eating the Pack

Local Services Ads (LSAs) are in more than 70 local business categories. Originally introduced in 2015 in a few home services industries, they were intended to offer a simplified, fixed-price-per-lead ad product that delivered more obvious, concrete value to small businesses than AdWords, which were more opaque and drove significant churn. In 2020, bidding was introduced and they came to resemble Google Ads in many respects. In crucial ways, however, they don't look like traditional Google ads at all. As everyone reading this knows, LSAs look like Pack listings, only more so. They've got prominent, eye catching images; they feature reviews and offer other details that make them fairly compelling to users. Landing pages look like GBPs as well. They're always relevant to the query and are probably the best example of Google's familiar earnings-call mantra: "Ads are useful content." They're also almost always in the top slot in the SERP. What we see in our user-testing research is that when LSAs are present, as they often are these days, they grab attention and clicks often at the expense of the Local Pack and certainly of organic results. Many times organic results are way down the page. In the result below, you need to scroll to "page 4" before you see an organic listing. Even self-identified "ad skeptics" respond to LSAs.