Smoke & Receipts

Local Service Ads charge per lead, not per click. Across 888 home service contractors in February 2026 the average lead cost $53, and roofing leads went from $73.62 to $106.87 in a year.

Since October 1, 2026, a missed call during business hours is a charged lead when the caller holds more than 20 seconds. A voicemail greeting counts as connected.

Google Guaranteed, Google Screened and License Verified were replaced by one Google Ver...

This one is a sit-down with Ross Seymour of EHR1, a practice management platform for offices that serve Medicare and Medicaid patients.

It started with a grant. Ross found money that could help doctors upgrade their technology, then saw there was no platform built for the practices that would spend it.

The hardest stretch was certification. Getting through the ONC certification process for CMS took Ross two full years.

What EHR1 does ...

This one is a sit-down with family. Silver State Locksmith in Las Vegas has been with Clickflame since 2015, one of our very first clients.

Mike German is one of the owners. Silver State does residential, commercial and automotive locksmith work, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

The hype we checked is the one every locksmith hears. You are locked out, you search locksmith near me, and you call whoever comes up first. Mike ...

Everett Local Movers runs two movers and one truck. Their old site was a free template with no prices, no photos of the work and a phone number shared with three other side businesses.

The owner sent the pricing in three texts. That became the whole brief, and the rate became the headline.

The site went from domain purchase to live in one day, with five service pages and fourteen town pages. Each town page does the mileage math, so t...

This is our first episode with a real guest. Brian Huey runs Huey's Mobile, a mobile mechanic in Monroe, North Carolina. He brings the shop to your driveway.

Brian spent ten years in restaurants and five in grocery. Then he made assistant manager at an express lube place in about six months. They wanted $100 ticket averages with ten minute bay times. He would not sell people work they did not need, so he left and started his own bus...

Appliance repair calls come from four places. Your Business Profile, Local Services Ads, Google Search ads and bought leads.

Local Services charges per valid lead. From October 1, 2026, it also charges for a missed call during business hours when the caller stays on the line more than 20 seconds.

Search ads let you pick the words. Negative keywords keep your ads off do it yourself searches.

In a 2006 opinion letter, FTC staff said a b...

Start with one test. Search your exact business name and town on Google Maps and in regular search, then search the way a customer would from inside your service area.

If your name finds nothing, the profile is missing, unowned, unverified, suspended or not eligible. Google says verification reviews take up to five business days, and changing your name, address or category while waiting on a postcard cancels the code.

Suspended profi...

Landscaping calls follow the weather. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says grounds workers may be busier in spring, summer and fall, and some crews switch to snow removal in winter.

Keep your Google Business Profile sharp all year. List up to 20 service areas, post real before and after photos with the town in the caption, and mark the business temporarily closed if you close for seven days or more in a row.

Turn paid ads up a few wee...

Google removed every way to create a new call-only ad in February 2026, and existing call-only ads stop getting impressions in February 2027.

The replacement is a responsive search ad with a call asset attached. It can hold up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, and a tap on the call button costs the same as a click on the headline.

The real risk is counting. Turn on call reporting before you build anything, mark the Calls from ads c...

In a 2006 opinion letter, FTC staff said a business that buys a lead generally does not have its own established business relationship with that consumer, which is one of the exceptions for calling numbers on the Do Not Call list.

Staff said it would not recommend action if the seller clearly told the consumer what would happen before they submitted. The letter was about lenders, it is staff's view and not binding, and other rules m...

A 2007 study in Arboriculture and Urban Forestry found the four largest tree care firms held only 4% of industry receipts across nearly 82,000 businesses. The numbers are old, so treat them as a rough picture.

Google allows one Business Profile per business. A second profile for stump grinding usually splits your reviews and can get both profiles in trouble.

List up to 20 service areas by city or ZIP code within about two hours of dr...

Many lead sellers send the same request to three or four plumbers at once, so a shared lead is a race that often goes to whoever quotes lowest.

Owned channels like your Business Profile, website and reviews make you the only plumber in the conversation, and you keep the customer.

Local Services charges per valid lead, so your business hours act as a billing setting. From October 1, 2026, missed calls during business hours are charged...

A cheap lead that never books costs more than an expensive one that does. Shared leads cost less but go to two or three other companies at once, so the first company to call wins.

Your break even cost per lead is your average profit per job times your close rate. With made up round numbers, a three hundred dollar profit and one close in four gives a break even of seventy five dollars a lead.

Run two tracks at once. Local Services or ...

Google's help page says lead form leads expire after 60 days, so you should download them often. The Google Ads API can also pull up to 60 days of leads.

Only users with Standard or Admin access can download leads. Billing, Email only and Read only users cannot, so check who on your team has the right access.

For most owners the webhook is the answer. Paste a webhook URL and key from your CRM into the lead form editor, press Send tes...

Free Dentist Office lists 164,748 dental offices in all 50 states and DC. On October 1, 2026, Google showed 178 of its pages as indexed. The article says plainly there is no happy ending yet.

The first version was California only, with 18,460 office pages that were mostly a name, an address, a phone number and a specialty. After the September 2026 spam update began on September 24, average position slid from about 12 to about 18.

The...

If all Google sees is a click or a call, it finds more clicks and calls, including the ones that never become work. The fix is to send booked jobs back into Google Ads.

One giant campaign mixes a fifty dollar tune up with a ten thousand dollar install under one budget and one bid. Build one campaign per job type instead.

Import phone call conversions from your own records, and wait at least four hours after creating the conversion ac...

People keep asking what Clickflame actually does. So we ran our own receipts on the air.

The hype we hear all the time is that a local business has to spend thousands a month on ads just to get calls. Ads are rent. The day you stop paying, the calls stop. A site that ranks is something you own.

Marcus walks through how it works. First we look at your site the way a customer does, on a phone. On one site we checked, the main picture t...