Type "bed bugs" into Google's Keyword Planner for the whole US and it comes back with 823,000 searches a month. Type "pest control near me" and you get 165,000. On volume alone, the bug wins by five to one.
Then check the price tag Google puts on each. Keyword Planner estimates a top-of-page click on "bed bugs" at $0.04 to $8.37. The same estimate for "pest control near me" starts at $9.24 and climbs to $42.80. The smaller search costs up to five times more per click, and the companies paying it aren't confused. They're buying the search where someone has already decided to hire.
That gap is the whole chapter. A pest control company's customers pass through several stages before they pick up the phone, and Google has a different place to meet them at each one. A new account starts where the money is, not where the volume is.
Advertisers Pay Up to $43 for "Pest Control Near Me" and Under $9 for "Bed Bugs"
Bids are the market voting with its wallet. Thousands of advertisers, many of them national brands with real data, have already tested which pest searches turn into paying customers, and Keyword Planner's bid estimates are the running tally. You don't have to agree with the vote to learn from it.
The stages we use in every guide come from the classic awareness ladder:
- Unaware: something is happening, but the person doesn't think of it as a pest problem yet.
- Problem aware: they know something is wrong and want to know what it is.
- Solution aware: they know the options, including doing it themselves.
- Service aware: they've decided to hire and are choosing who.
- Most aware: they already have a company, or know exactly which one they want.
The marketing job changes at each rung: create awareness at the top, build interest, help with a decision, then make the call easy. Here is how those stages look in real pest searches.
A "Palmetto Bug" Search Is Someone Asking What Just Ran Across the Kitchen
The biggest pest searches in America are people naming a bug. "Bed bug bites" matches "bed bugs" at 823,000 a month. "Cockroach" pulls 301,000, "what do termites look like" 49,500. In our example market, Tampa-St. Petersburg, "palmettobug" alone draws 8,100 searches a month, more than "pest control near me" does there. Your market's local bug will be a different one. The pattern holds.
These are unaware and problem-aware searches, and customers describe that moment plainly. From the Reddit threads we read: "It’s just a palmetto bug, it’s not that serious." "I kept hearing a scratching." "I have been waking up with bites."
Every one of those people might become a customer. Almost none of them is ready to book today, and the bids show it: advertisers pay pennies for "cockroach" ($0.04 to $3.99) because the searcher wants a picture, not a quote. A new account that chases this volume spends its budget teaching Google to find curious people. Leave it for later, when there's a campaign built for it.
These searches still earn their keep before you ever bid on them. They show you the words your market uses for its bugs. In Florida, people argue on Reddit about whether a palmetto bug is a roach at all; in other states the local name is different. Those names turn up later as the searches Exploration finds and the phrases your headlines borrow, so write them down now.
The Do-It-Yourselfer Is Pricing Spray, Not Exterminators
One step down the ladder, people know what they're dealing with and weigh the options. "How to get rid of roaches" draws 27,100 searches a month in the US. "Diy pest control" draws 18,100. The hardware store is competing for this person, and it has a head start.
The Reddit threads show the thinking out loud. One homeowner asked, "Is it worth it to pay for pest control in Central Florida? or is this something we can take care of ourselves?" Another summed up a whole philosophy in five words: "DIY preventative, hire for infestations."
That second line matters for your account. The do-it-yourselfer isn't lost for good. When the spray stops working, some of them come back and search for a company, and by then they're the most motivated caller you'll get all week. For now, DIY searches belong on your negative list, which Chapter 5 builds. Later, they are a reason to run the awareness campaigns in the second half of this guide.
Buyers Ready to Hire Ask Reddit Who's Good and Ask Google What It Costs
Service-aware searches are short and specific: "pest control near me," "exterminator near me," the pest and the town. They're the smallest group by volume and the most valuable by far, which is why the bids climb past $40.
We also looked at what Google shows next to these searches in the example market, and two things stood out. A Reddit thread came up on 14 of the 20 pest searches we checked, usually someone asking their local subreddit, "Any suggestions for pest control companies for homeowners in the Tampa area?" And on 16 of those 20 searches, Google's "People also ask" box included a cost question, such as how much pest control should cost per month.
So the buyer arrives with two questions: are you any good, and what will it cost? Your ad and the page behind it should answer both before the phone rings. Reviews answer the first. A plan price, or at least a range, answers the second.
Some companies in the example market answer the price question right on the page. Truly Nolen's online checkout gives an instant plan price by home size. Aptive leads with "Get your first treatment for just $49," with the terms spelled out beside it: a 12-month agreement and a standard initial treatment price of $399. You don't have to publish a number to compete, but a page that dodges the question sends the buyer back to the search results to keep shopping.
One Reddit poster put the priority plainly, "Effectiveness is more important to me than cost," and still asked about cost. Most people call around. "I called around to a couple places to get quotes" is how a service-aware buyer shops.
Your Own Customers Type Your Name Into Google, and That Search Needs Its Own Campaign
At the bottom of the ladder, people type a company's name. In the example market, "terminix" draws 4,400 searches a month and "massey services" 3,600. A regional company's name can pull nearly as many searches as a national brand's.
Those searchers are your most aware customers: current plan holders, past customers and neighbors who were told your name. The review language sounds like this: "Wouldn't call anyone else."
Give brand searches their own small campaign from month one. Brand clicks cost little: in the example market Google puts "terminix" at $4.11 to $13.96 a click, a fraction of the $10.14 to $42.90 it gives "pest control near me." The person already wants that company, and a brand campaign of your own keeps you at the top when a competitor bids on your name. It also keeps brand clicks out of your other campaigns, so their results aren't inflated by people who were going to call you anyway.
The flip side: other companies' names belong on your negative list in the generic campaigns. Someone searching for a national brand by name wants that company. Paying to show up there is a separate decision with its own campaign, if you ever make it, and most local companies never need to.
Google Has a Channel for Every Stage. Your First Dollar Belongs at the Bottom.
Google doesn't have one ad for every stage. It has several products, and each fits a different rung:
- Service-aware and brand searches: Search campaigns, plus Local Services Ads (Google's pay-per-lead ads), which Chapter 12 sets up as a test once your first Search campaign is running.
- "Near me" searches on phones: Google Maps, reached through location assets that pull from your Business Profile.
- Problem-aware homeowners who haven't searched for a company yet: Demand Gen, which runs across YouTube, Discover and Gmail.
- Everything at once, once the data is clean: Performance Max, months into the account.
Our method at BrandRocket starts at the bottom and works up. Our first campaign, which we call Isolation at BrandRocket, sticks to exact-match hire searches and lets you set every bid by hand. A brand campaign runs beside it. After the account logs roughly 30 genuine conversions in a month, Exploration comes next. That's our label for a broad-match campaign, where Google goes looking for hire searches nobody put on the list. The upper stages come after that, when Google has learned what a customer looks like.
When that time comes, pest control has an unusually good audience waiting. Google's own list of life events, which Demand Gen can reach, includes "Recently Purchased a Home" and "Purchasing a Home Soon." A new homeowner who hasn't met their first spider yet is exactly the unaware customer at the top of this ladder. Chapter 11 builds that campaign.
There's a newer wrinkle worth knowing. Google now shows ads inside its AI Overviews, the AI-written answers at the top of some searches, but only from campaigns that use broad match, AI Max, Performance Max, Shopping or Dynamic Search Ads. An exact-match starter campaign won't appear there. In the example market that barely matters at the start: AI Overviews showed on 9 of 22 searches we checked, mostly identification and cost questions, and not once on "pest control near me."
A company with a large budget can run upper-stage campaigns sooner. Large here means enough to buy the hire searches fully and still have money left over to teach Google about the curious. Most can't, and they don't need to. The hire searches pay for everything that comes after.
Next: What One Quarterly Plan Customer Is Worth
Starting at the bottom means paying the highest bids in pest control. Whether $30 or $40 a click is a bargain depends on what a customer is worth, and in a business built on quarterly plans that number is bigger than the first visit suggests. Chapter 3 does the math.
If you haven't set up tracking yet, Chapter 1 comes first. All sixteen chapters, from tracking to commercial accounts, are on the guide's home page.
When we run Google Ads management for a pest company, the first campaigns aim at people who are ready to hire, and the curious get their turn once the account has proven what a customer looks like.
