August is often quieter for Kent and Sussex service businesses. School holidays change the diary. Some decision-makers are away. That is a bad week to launch a big campaign you have not thought through, and a good week to clean the account you will need in September.
I would rather spend August on search terms, negatives and landing pages than keep spending on queries that never convert. The work is unglamorous. It is also how you stop autumn budget disappearing into the same leaks.
Read the search terms before you raise budget
Open the search terms report for the last 30 to 90 days. You are looking for queries you never meant to buy: job seekers, DIY instructions, the wrong town, the wrong service. Add negatives. Keep the phrases that match how a paying customer actually speaks.
If you only look at keyword lists, you miss this. Keywords are what you hoped for. Search terms are what Google charged you for.
Check the page the ad lands on
An ad can be tidy and still waste money if it sends people to a homepage that talks about everything. The landing page should repeat the promise in the ad, show proof, and offer one next step. In August I click every live ad on my phone and ask: would I know what to do in ten seconds?
- Headline and first paragraph match the keyword theme, including the town if you are bidding on local terms.
- The form or click-to-call is visible without scrolling on a phone.
- You are not sending paid traffic to a blog post that never asks for an enquiry.
Set autumn before the diary fills
- Write the September to November offers or capacity now. If you cannot take work until October, the ads should say so or pause.
- Separate brand campaigns from generic service campaigns so you can see what each is actually doing.
- Put a daily cap you can live with in a slow week, then a note in the calendar to review it in the first week of September.
- If conversion tracking is broken, fix that before you scale. Otherwise you are optimising on guesses.
Paid search is not a substitute for the website
If organic listings and the Google Business Profile are neglected, ads become the only tap that works, and they get expensive. I treat ads as a way to buy the demand you cannot rank for yet, not as a way to hide a slow site or a dead form.
I will not quote a typical cost per lead here. It depends on the trade, the town and the landing page. What I can do in August is make sure you are not paying for the wrong searches when autumn starts.
If you want the account and the landing pages reviewed before September, send me access to Google Ads and the live URLs. I will tell you what I would pause, what I would keep, and what the page still needs to do.
