A homeowner calls a pest company because they saw a roach. A restaurant manager calls because a health inspector might see one, and an auditor will ask to see the proof that nobody has.
Same bugs, different buyer. Everything in the first fifteen chapters was built around the homeowner: the fear, the phone call, the quarterly plan. Commercial pest control runs on a different engine. The person searching isn't scared of the bug. They're accountable for it, to an inspector, an auditor or a corporate office, and they're shopping for a company that makes that accountability easy.
That changes the keywords, the page, the headline and the conversion. It's also, for many pest companies, where the steadiest money is.
Commercial Pest Control Clicks Cost Up to $100. The Buyer Is a Manager With a Checklist, Not a Homeowner With a Roach.
Commercial work isn't a side business in this industry. Rollins, the company behind Orkin, reported that commercial pest control made up 33.1% of its 2025 revenue. The National Pest Management Association reported the commercial segment posting "a nearly 7.0% increase in service revenue."
The auction knows it. We pulled a year of US data from Google's Keyword Planner. "Pest control near me," the biggest residential search, runs about 165,000 US searches a month, and Keyword Planner prices a top-of-page click there at $9.24 to $42.80. "Commercial pest control" averaged 8,100, and its range ran from $19.12 to $100. "Pest control for restaurants" averaged 1,900, at $18.79 to $100. Chapter 7 saw the same $100 ceiling in our example market.
Fewer searches, pricier clicks. That's normal for a buyer with a bigger contract and a longer relationship, and it means a wasted commercial click hurts more than a wasted residential one.
The calendar is different too. In the year we pulled, "pest control for restaurants" ran 2,400 to 3,600 searches a month from September through March, then dropped to 590 to 880 from April through August, the reverse of the termite curve in Chapter 15. One year of data isn't a law, so check your own market before you plan around it. But if your residential work peaks in spring, commercial searches may be what keeps the phones busy in the other half of the year.
A Health Inspector Looks for Roaches. An SQF Auditor Asks for Your Pest Company's Paperwork.
The commercial buyer's urgency comes from rules, and the rules are written down.
Restaurants are inspected under state and local food rules, and many of those rules are built on the FDA's model Food Code. The Food Code says pests are controlled by "routinely inspecting the premises for evidence of pests," routinely inspecting incoming shipments, using trapping devices or other control methods when pests are found, and "eliminating harborage conditions." Dead or trapped pests have to be removed from devices often enough to prevent their accumulation. On the FDA's model inspection report, one line reads simply: "Insects, rodents, and animals not present."
Food plants and food warehouses answer to federal manufacturing rules. The FDA's rule for facilities that manufacture, process, pack or hold food is blunt: "Pests must not be allowed in any area of a food plant," and "effective measures must be taken to exclude pests" from those areas.
Food companies with a food safety certification, such as SQF, get audited on pest control too, and the audit is where paperwork becomes the product. The SQF Food Safety Code for food manufacturing says "a documented pest prevention program shall be effectively implemented." Among other things, it has to "record pest sightings and trend the frequency of pest activity," outline "the appropriate documentation for each inspection," show every monitoring device on a site map, and list the chemicals used, with their Safety Data Sheets available.
Read that list again as a pest company. Much of it comes straight from your service reports. When an auditor asks for pest records, the plant manager hands over whatever your technicians wrote down. If it's thin, the manager is the one who looks bad.
None of this is legal advice, and rules differ by state, city and certification scheme. But the pattern holds across all three: the food business is judged on pest records, and the pest company writes them.
Not every commercial account works this way. For offices, apartment buildings and most warehouses that don't hold food, we didn't find a comparable rule that asks for pest records. Those buyers still care about response time, tenant complaints and a clean service history, but nobody is auditing the binder. So don't paste the audit pitch onto every commercial page. Save it for the food businesses, and sell the property manager on speed, scheduling and one point of contact.
"Audit-Ready Records" Outsells "We Kill Everything" When the Buyer Answers to an Inspector.
Most pest ads are written for the homeowner: speed, price, a guarantee. A restaurant manager reading "Bugs gone fast!" learns nothing about the one thing they're actually hiring for.
Write commercial ads for the checklist instead. The strongest lines describe what the buyer will be able to show someone else:
- The records. Service reports after every visit, sighting logs, trend reports and a device map, if your service includes them.
- The audit. Documentation built for food safety audits, and help preparing for one, if you actually provide it.
- The schedule. Service before opening or after close, if your crews do it, so nobody sprays near a lunch rush.
- The industries. Restaurants, food warehouses, schools, property management. A buyer scanning the page wants to see their own world named.
The same rule from Chapter 14 applies with more force here: every claim has to be true, because this buyer will check. "Audit-ready" in a headline is a promise the auditor tests. If your reports are a checkbox and a signature, fix the reports before you advertise them.
The ad's extras can carry the checklist too. Sitelinks can point to each industry page: restaurants, food warehouses, property management. Google's structured snippets include a "Service catalog" header, and Google suggests at least four values per header, which fits a list like service reports, device mapping, sighting trends and after-hours service, as long as each one is real. Callouts are a good home for short proofs such as "Reports after every visit."
Chapter 8 argued for headlines about the technician. For commercial work, the technician still matters, but the evidence changes. The homeowner remembers the tech who explained everything. The plant manager remembers the tech whose report held up in the audit.
Commercial Searches Need Their Own Campaign, Page and Negatives. "Pest Control Business for Sale" Is Not a Customer.
Every structural decision in this guide points the same way for commercial work: separate it.
Its own campaign. Chapter 15 explained why budgets live at the campaign level. Commercial clicks cost more, arrive on a different calendar and convert more slowly. Sharing a budget with residential ad groups means one side quietly starves the other.
Its own page. Chapter 4 built one page per pest so the ad and the page say the same thing. A commercial searcher who lands on a page about family-safe quarterly plans has been sent to the wrong store. The commercial page names the industries you serve, shows what a service report looks like, explains how often you visit and how you document it, and asks for a walkthrough, not a free home inspection.
Its own negatives. Commercial searches attract people who aren't buying pest control at all. Keyword Planner showed "pest control business for sale" at about 1,000 searches a month: that's someone shopping for a company to own, not a company to hire. Searches about starting a pest control business, pest control jobs and licensing courses belong on the same list. Keyword Planner also lumps "pest control business" together with "exterminator for business," so the only way to know which one you're buying is the search terms report, the same habit Chapters 5 and 6 built.
Start on exact match, the same way Isolation started in Chapter 6: "commercial pest control," "commercial exterminator near me," "pest control for restaurants" and the industries you actually serve. Broaden only after the campaign is signing contracts.
A Commercial Contract Closes Weeks After the Click. Import the Signature, or Google Learns From Form Fills.
A residential plan can be sold at the kitchen table the same week. A commercial account often takes a site walkthrough, a written proposal and a signature from someone above the person who searched. That can take weeks.
That delay is exactly why Chapter 1 matters most here. If the only conversion Google sees is the form fill, it learns to find people who fill out forms, which can include students, job seekers and competitors checking your prices. If it sees the signed contract, imported back into Google Ads the way Chapter 1 described, it learns to find people who sign.
For commercial accounts, track the steps in between as well:
- The request. A call or form asking for a walkthrough. A lead, not a sale.
- The walkthrough. A site visit completed. The first real sign of intent.
- The signed contract. The conversion that carries the value, uploaded when it happens, even if it's weeks later.
Give the contract its real value. Rollins says that "in general, pest control customers sign an initial one-year contract," and that recurring relationships "often extend over multi-year periods." Chapter 3's lifetime value math applies, with bigger numbers. A campaign that looks expensive per form fill can be the cheapest customer acquisition in the account once the contracts are counted.
Google Finds More of Whatever You Count as a Pest Control Sale. Make It the Signed Plan.
That's the whole method, from the first conversion to the last campaign type. Count signed plans, not button taps. Buy the searches that mean hiring. Price each pest on its own lifetime value. Build one page per bug. Start exact, then explore. Add Performance Max, Demand Gen and AI Max only when the account has earned them. Treat termites, claims and commercial accounts as the separate businesses they are.
If you're catching up, Chapter 1 set up the conversions this chapter depends on, Chapter 4 built one page per buyer and Chapter 15 gave termites their own budget. Every chapter, from the first conversion to the last commercial contract, is listed on the pest control guide's home page.
On the pest accounts in our Google Ads management, commercial work gets its own campaign, its own page and a conversion that only counts when the contract is signed.
