Is your website ready for Google Ads?

Most trade business owners ask about Google Ads the wrong way round. They ask how much it costs per click before they ask whether their website is ready for Google Ads to send anyone there at all. Get the order wrong and you pay £2 to £8 a click (more like £8 to £15 for "emergency plumber" style searches) to send strangers to a site that loses them in ten seconds.

Google Ads is fast. It puts you at the top of the results the moment someone searches, no waiting for rankings to build. But fast only helps if the page someone lands on actually does its job. Here's what needs sorting first.

🔍 Why a website ready for Google Ads matters more than the ad itself

Every paid click is money spent whether the visitor calls you or not. If your site is slow, unclear, or missing basic trust signals, you're paying to lose. A well-built page converts a decent share of visitors into enquiries; a weak one converts almost none, no matter how good the ad copy is. Agencies that run ads for a living say this outright: fix the site before you fund the traffic. Once the destination works, a modest daily budget (many sole traders start around £10 to £20) goes a lot further than the same budget pointed at a page nobody trusts.

📞 The basics that have to be there before you spend a penny

A handful of things separate a site that converts from one that just sits there:

• A phone number that's impossible to miss. Top of every page, clickable on mobile, not buried in a footer.
• A simple contact form that asks for the job, not an essay. Name, number, what's needed, ideally a photo upload. Three fields beats twelve.
• Clear coverage areas. Say which towns you work in on the page itself, not just in your Google Business Profile. This also helps Google match your ad to the right searches.
• Real photos of real jobs. Stock images of a smiling man in a hard hat do nothing. A gallery of actual completed work does.
• Reviews visible on the page, not just linked off to Google. If someone clicks an ad and lands on a page with no evidence anyone's used you before, they'll bounce back and click a competitor instead.
• A clear price signal. You don't need a full price list, but "fixed quotes before work starts" or a typical call-out charge stops people leaving to compare elsewhere.

None of this is complicated. Most of it is missing from trade websites we see, not because owners don't care, but because the site was built years ago and never revisited.

💷 What it actually costs to fix versus what ads cost to run

This is the bit that changes the maths for most trade businesses. A proper base build with the essentials above starts at £395, with extra pages at £25 each if you need dedicated pages per service or per town. Ongoing small changes (updating a price, swapping a photo, adding a new testimonial) run £25 a batch, or £95 a month if you'd rather have a care plan handling it without thinking about it.

Compare that to ad spend: even a cautious £15 a day is over £450 a month, every month, for as long as you want the traffic to keep coming. Spend that on a broken website and you're funding wasted clicks indefinitely. Spend a fraction of one month's ad budget fixing the site first, and every pound you later put into ads works harder.

🎯 What order to actually do things in

1. Fix the phone number, contact form and coverage area first. This takes a day, not a fortnight.
2. Add real photos and visible reviews. If you're not sure how to display reviews properly, do that before ads too; social proof is doing a lot of the persuading.
3. Check the site loads fast on a phone. Most trade enquiries happen on mobile, often from someone standing in front of a broken boiler.
4. Only then consider Google Ads or Local Services Ads, starting small and watching which searches actually turn into calls before increasing spend.

Skipping straight to step four is the single most common way trade businesses waste ad budget in the first month.

✅ The practical takeaway

Ads and a good website aren't competing options, they're sequential ones. The website is the thing that turns a click you paid for into a job you get paid for. If yours doesn't have a clear number, real photos, visible reviews and a fast, simple way to get in touch, that's the first job, not the ads account. Get that right and even a small ad budget starts earning its keep; get it wrong and no budget will fix it.