Editor’s note: The following article is from Lorne Sederoff, vice president of channel development, SearchKings, a digital marketing agency that focuses on Google and Microsoft advertising for home service businesses.
For many pest control business owners, generating leads through Google Ads is essential, but not all leads are created equal. A paid phone call from an existing customer or a solicitor is wasted ad dollars. These calls do nothing to grow your business but still eat into your budget.
Meanwhile, new AI-powered tools like ChatGPT are changing how people search for and choose local service providers. To stay competitive, it’s no longer enough to rely on keywords and traditional tactics. You need to be one step ahead of your competition.
This article breaks down two key areas that will drive growth in 2025 and beyond: optimizing ad spend on Google by focusing on 1) real revenue and 2) staying ahead of the competition as AI transforms search behavior.
Spend Smarter on Google
Let’s say your pest control company gets 100 calls a month from Google Ads. After listening to the calls, you realize only 30 are real pest issues from new customers. The rest are not revenue opportunities from new customers. Most are billing inquiries, wrong numbers, solicitors, or repeat callers. If your ads are optimized for call volume instead of lead quality, you will keep paying for leads that never turn into jobs.
Many pest control businesses struggle with ad spend drifting in the wrong direction. Campaigns may appear to perform well based on call volume, but without tying those calls to actual revenue, the return on investment remains unclear. Google’s solution to this is Target ROAS (return on ad spend), a bidding strategy that shifts the focus from the number of leads to the revenue those leads generate. For lead generation, this requires sending revenue data back to Google, often through an offline import from completed jobs. For many service-based businesses, this can be challenging to implement without the right systems in place. That’s where SearchKings gives you an edge. Their Call Intelligence platform scores and classifies every lead, feeding Google Ads real call insights. This allows the platform to optimize ads toward calls scored as high-quality leads, helping it focus on generating more of the leads that matter, rather than just increasing activity.
AI Is Changing How Customers Search
When someone looks up “how to get rid of carpenter ants,” they might not go to Google anymore. Increasingly, they are using AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Bing Copilot, and Gemini to get direct answers instead of browsing search results. These platforms pull information from websites, business listings, and structured data, and are designed to provide trusted answers rather than a list of links.
If your pest control company wants to be the answer these tools provide, your online presence needs to be structured for machines as well as humans. That means having clear service pages, useful FAQs, and strong calls to action. Even more pressing, Google’s new campaign format, AI Max for Search, is changing the way Google Ads work. Announced at the 2025 Google Marketing Live, this AI-powered campaign type uses your website content and business data to generate ad headlines, match user intent, and optimize performance across formats. The quality and clarity of your site content now directly affect how effectively Google can promote your services.
Your Google Business Profile, formerly Google My Business, also plays a critical role in local visibility. A complete and accurate profile with correct business hours, service areas, and categories helps ensure your business shows up in Google Maps and local search results. Strong review generation and consistent listings across platforms like Google, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Facebook, and Yelp further support your visibility and credibility.
Final Thoughts
Across the pest control industry, businesses that are seeing the strongest results are moving beyond basic lead generation. They are focusing on lead quality and preparing their digital presence for the evolving role of AI in search and advertising.
Companies still running campaigns without tracking lead quality or relying on outdated websites risk falling behind. In 2025, the businesses that grow are those that invest in smarter ad strategies, embrace automation with control, and build digital foundations that search engines and AI platforms can clearly understand and trust.
Learn more about Search Kings at http://searchkings.com.
