We ran two searches from our example market, Raleigh-Durham, on the same afternoon.
The first was "general contractor raleigh." Page one opened with a Facebook post recruiting licensed general contractors for work in the area. Next came Procore's directory of commercial contractors, then its directory of specialty contractors, a lead-generation site, and Houzz's list of new-home construction companies. Under "People also ask," Google offered "How much does a general contractor make in NC?"
The second was "kitchen remodel raleigh." Page one was remodelers' own kitchen pages, a Yelp list of kitchen remodelers, and a map pack of three companies Google labeled "Kitchen remodeler."
Google understood the second search perfectly. It wasn't sure what the first one wanted, so it served a little of everything: subcontractors looking for work, commercial buyers, people wondering about pay. Your ads face the same problem, and the same fix. This chapter explains how Google decides whose ad shows and what it pays, why Quality Score is a gauge and not a lever, and why the most dependable way up the page for a residential contractor is an ad group built around one project, pointed at a page about that project.
Outbidding the Remodeler Next Door Is the Most Expensive Way to Win Ad Rank.
Every time a homeowner searches, Google runs an auction among the ads that could show, and Ad Rank decides who shows and in what order. Google's help page on Ad Rank lists six inputs. Translated onto a job site:
- Your bid, the only input you can raise by paying more
- The ad and its page, graded live against this exact search
- A minimum bar: below it, the ad doesn't run at all
- The other bidders: how many remodelers are in the auction and how close their ads are to yours
- The homeowner's situation: their town, their phone or laptop, the hour, the rest of what they typed
- Your add-ons: whether sitelinks, a call button and the like are expected to earn the click
One of those six costs more every time you turn it up. The other five reward work you do once. Google's own help page puts it in writing: better ads often cost less per click. It doesn't publish a formula for how much lower, and you'll see old videos and blog posts that claim one. Ignore them. Google is the source, and Google doesn't give one.
That's the whole case for the rest of this chapter. If two contractors bid the same on "bathroom remodel," the one whose ad and page fit the search better wins the higher spot, and often pays less for it.
Quality Score Is a Diagnostic, Like a Moisture Meter. It Points at the Problem; It Doesn't Fix It.
Anyone who has opened a Google Ads account has seen it: a score from 1 to 10 beside every keyword. Plenty of them have been told to "raise their Quality Score" as if it were a dial. It isn't.
Google is explicit that Quality Score plays no part in the auction itself; it's there to help you diagnose. Think of it as a report card that grades your ad against other advertisers chasing the same keyword. Each keyword gets three grades. Each grade lands above, at or below the average advertiser for that keyword.
Expected click-through rate: Google's guess at whether your ad gets clicked when it appears for that keyword. Google judges it with your ad's position, assets and other formats taken out of the comparison. Paying for the top spot won't lift this grade, and neither will piling on sitelinks. What raises it is ad text a homeowner wants to click for that search.
Ad relevance: whether the ad fits what the person searching actually wanted. When this one is below average, the ad group is usually the problem: too many different projects sharing one ad.
Landing page experience: whether the click lands somewhere that delivers on the ad for that homeowner. When this one is low, look at the page before you touch the ad.
A brand-new account starts with no readings at all. Google builds Quality Score from past impressions on searches that exactly match the keyword, and a dash in the Quality Score column means there haven't been enough of those searches yet. So a new remodeling account opens on exact match. Chapter 1's Isolation campaign gathers the first readings on the project searches you'd most like to own. It's also why we bid firmly in the first weeks, while there's no score to lean on, and ease off as the readings come in.
Use it the way you'd use a moisture meter on a bathroom subfloor. The reading tells you where the water is. It doesn't dry anything out. A low score on a keyword sends you to one of three places: the ad's words, the ad group, or the page.
A "General Contractor" Ad Group Can't Match Anybody. A Kitchen Ad Group Can Match the Kitchen Search.
Look back at those two searches. "General contractor raleigh" pulled in job seekers, commercial buyers and a question about pay. In the Keyword Planner pulls behind this guide, generic "general contractor" and "construction company" searches with no project or residential word attached made up about 15% of US search volume. The homeowner who wants a new kitchen is in there somewhere, along with everyone else.
An ad written for "general contractor" has to speak to all of them, so it speaks to none of them well. Picture something like "Licensed & insured. Residential and commercial. Free estimates." Every word may be true, and none of it is about the homeowner's kitchen.
Now picture the alternative: an ad group for kitchen remodeling, holding five or six tightly related searches ("kitchen remodel," "kitchen remodeling contractor," "kitchen renovation company," with your city or "near me"). Its ad says "Kitchen Remodeling in [your area]," talks about cabinets, layouts and how long a kitchen takes, and sends the click to your kitchen page. Repeat that for baths, additions, basements and whole-home renovations. That's ad relevance working the way Google intends it: an ad that fits what the homeowner meant, not just what they typed.
In the example market, one remodeler does exactly this. Its kitchen ad and its bathroom ad are separate ads with project-named display paths, and its website has a separate kitchen page and a separate bathrooms page. It's a small company, and it has the most important part of the structure right.
How big do those groups run in a real metro? In the example market, bathrooms lead the projects: Keyword Planner puts "bathroom remodel" near 1,000 searches a month. Kitchens come next at 480. Additions draw 260, basements 140, and whole-house renovation just 20. The generic "general contractor near me" tops all of them at 1,300.
Big, yes. It's also the same crowd from the left-hand corkboard: job seekers, commercial buyers and a few homeowners. A small number isn't a reason to fold a project into a bigger group. If twenty whole-house searches a month produce even one signed renovation, they deserve an ad group, an ad and a page of their own. A whole-house client reading a generic remodeling page is a client reading someone else's page next.
The same logic runs the other way for the projects you don't want. If you don't do decks, a deck search shouldn't land in an ad group whose page shows decks. Chapter 5 covers how to sort the keyword list so each search lands where it belongs.
The Page Is Part of the Ad. Eight of 12 Contractor Ads We Checked Promised Something Their Own Site Didn't Say.
Google grades the page as part of the ad, so the page has to finish the sentence the ad started. When we compared the example-market advertisers' ads with their own websites, 8 of the 12 sites we profiled made an ad claim the site didn't carry or contradicted. A few of the patterns (we don't name businesses for this):
- An ad promising a project minimum that appears nowhere on the site.
- "Free remodeling consultations" in the ad, while the site describes a paid design contract.
- "Open 24 hours" in the ad, against weekday office hours on the site.
- An award count in the ad higher than the awards shown on the site.
Click a promise, land on a page that never mentions it, and a homeowner has every reason to hit the back button.
A landing page for a remodeling ad doesn't need to be fancy. It needs to answer the questions that homeowner brought with them:
- This project, by name, in the headline, matching the ad.
- Photos of this kind of project, ideally your own and ideally local.
- A cost range or a starting point, since Chapter 2 found a cost question under 21 of the 22 "People also ask" boxes we saw.
- How it works: estimate, design, contract, build, in plain steps.
- One way to book the estimate, visible without scrolling on a phone, with the phone number tappable.
Speed is part of the experience too. Google's PageSpeed Insights is free; put every remodeling landing page through it and work down the mobile list. Speed is a slice of the landing page grade, not the grade, and a quick-loading page about decks still fails a bathroom search.
Why does all of this matter so much? Because position matters. The top of the page gets more clicks, and in an industry where one signed kitchen can be worth tens of thousands, a higher spot on the searches that match your best projects is worth far more than a lower spot on every search that mentions "contractor."
If you'd like the ad groups and pages built for you, our Google Ads management sets up every contractor account by project from the first day.
Next: Keyword Planner Will Read a Contractor's Website for You. Sort the List Before You Trust It.
Chapter 5 shows how to find the searches for each ad group, starting from competitors' websites and your own, and why a custom builder's site can hand you a list that's one-third houses for sale.
This chapter is part of Google Ads for Contractors, our sixteen-chapter guide for residential general contractors and construction companies anywhere in the US.
