If you need the phone to ring this month and you have room on the schedule, pay for Google Ads first, on one high-ticket service. If you can wait three to six months, put the money into SEO. AEO comes along with good SEO for a local trades business, so don't buy it on its own as your first spend.
That's the short version. The longer one matters, because the expensive mistake runs in one direction. You buy the slow thing when you needed the fast thing, then cancel in month three, a few weeks before it would have started paying.
The three options, side by side
| Google Ads | SEO | AEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you pay for | Each click, or each lead with Local Services Ads | Someone's time, every month | Mostly the same monthly work as SEO, plus checking what AI says about you |
| How fast it works | Days | Months | Weeks to months, and it leans on SEO |
| When you stop paying | Leads stop that day | Rankings fade slowly | Mentions fade slowly |
| A real price | $90.92 per lead on average for home and home improvement | $501 to $1,000 a month is the most common retainer | Often sold inside an SEO plan |
| Pays off when | You have open slots now and jobs worth $1,000 or more | You plan to still be here in two years | Your site and listings are already in order |
The ad figure comes from LocalIQ's 2026 search advertising benchmarks, an average across thousands of Google and Microsoft campaigns. The SEO figure is from Ahrefs' pricing survey of 439 SEO providers, last updated in August 2024. Yours will differ. They're solid public numbers to start from.
Google Ads is the only one that works this week
There are two kinds, and trades businesses should know both.
Regular search ads charge you every time someone clicks. Local Services Ads are the boxes at the very top with a badge, and Google charges per lead for those: a call or a message, not a click. For most trades I'd look at Local Services Ads first, because you pay for a person who contacted you.
One line on that same Google page deserves more attention than it gets. If you regularly fail to answer calls or respond to messages, Google says your ad ranking may be affected. So an ad account punishes the exact habit most small crews have, which is letting calls go to voicemail while the whole crew is on a job. Fix that before you turn ads on. A missed-call text back is the cheapest way I know.
Do this math before you spend a dollar
Cost per lead means little until you divide it by how many leads you book.
Take LocalIQ's $90.92 average. Say you book one of every four people who call. Your cost per booked job is $90.92 times 4, which is about $364.
Now put that next to the job. These are example prices, so swap in your own:
- A $250 drain cleaning: you paid $364 to earn $250. You lose money unless that customer comes back.
- A $1,200 water heater install: $364 is about 30% of the ticket. Tight, and workable if your margin is good.
- A $7,000 furnace replacement: $364 is about 5%. Run that ad all winter.
That is the whole case for advertising one service instead of all of them. Ads on "plumber Des Moines" bring in every small job in the metro. Ads on water heater replacement or furnace replacement bring in fewer calls that are each worth far more.
SEO is slow, and it keeps paying after you stop
SEO for a trades business comes down to four things. You need a complete Google Business Profile, and a real page for each service and each town you work in. You need the same name and phone number everywhere you're listed, and a steady stream of reviews.
It is slow for a boring reason. Google says crawling alone can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and that's just Google noticing a page exists. Ranking it above a competitor who has had a page for six years takes longer. Nobody controls how long. Google's own hiring guide says no one can guarantee a number one ranking.
The failure looks like this. An owner signs up in October, sees nothing by December, and cancels in January, just as the work was starting to land. If you can't stay in for six months, don't start SEO. Buy ads instead, and know that's the trade you're making.
What SEO costs is its own question, and I went through the Iowa numbers in how much local SEO costs in Iowa.
AEO is real, small, and mostly included
AEO stands for answer engine optimization. It means getting your business named when someone asks ChatGPT, Google's AI or Perplexity who to call.
Two facts about it look like they disagree. They don't.
The first: BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults found that use of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools for local recommendations rose from 6% to 45% in a year. That's a lot of people asking.
The second: AI sends almost nobody to your website. Webspec, an Urbandale agency, cites SE Ranking data showing AI search drives about 0.15% of website visits.
Both are true because of how people use it. Someone asks for a furnace repair company, the AI names three, and the person calls one. No click, no visit, nothing in your analytics. You either got named or you didn't. That's why I'd judge AEO by AI mentions and phone calls, and ignore traffic.
This next part saves you money. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in its AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible to show in search. For a local trades business, most of AEO is SEO done properly.
The extra work is small. You find out what the AI tools say about you now, and you fix wrong hours or a wrong phone number on listings outside Google. You also make sure your server lets AI crawlers in. That last one is more common than you'd think. When we tested 20 Des Moines trades websites on October 12, 2026, five servers turned an AI crawler away.
Which one first, in five situations
You're new, with fewer than 20 reviews and an open schedule. Ads first, and Local Services Ads if your trade qualifies. You have no rankings to lean on and you need jobs to earn the reviews that SEO depends on.
You're established and booked most of the year, with slow shoulder months. SEO, with AEO alongside it. You don't need more calls in July. You need to be the name that comes up in March and October without paying for each one.
You're a roofer and hail just came through. Ads, today. SEO done after the storm is too late for this storm. The roofers who show up without paying built their pages last winter.
You're a one-truck shop turning work away. Spend nothing. Raise your prices, finish your Google Business Profile, and ask every customer for a review. Paying for calls you can't take is money gone.
You have two or more locations. SEO and AEO first. Search and AI treat each city as its own market, so each location needs its own page and its own listing before ads in either city make sense.
What I'd do at three budgets
$500 a month. No ads. At $90.92 a lead, $500 buys five or six leads, which is too few to tell whether the ads work. Do the free list below, then put the money into the smallest real SEO plan you can find or do it yourself.
$1,500 a month. If you need work now, I'd put about $1,000 into ads on one high-ticket service, which is roughly 11 leads at the average. The rest goes to SEO so the ad spend can shrink next year. If your schedule is healthy, skip the ads and put all of it into SEO.
$3,000 a month. Both, and now it's worth tracking which jobs came from where. At this level, the mistake to avoid is spending for a year without checking.
Webiyo doesn't sell ad management, so I have nothing to gain by steering you toward ads or away from them. We do sell the SEO and AEO side, from $397 a month, and you can see every plan on the pricing page.
Four free things to do before you pay anyone
- Fill in every field of your Google Business Profile, including services, service area and hours.
- Ask your last 20 customers for a review, by text, with the link.
- Make your business name, address and phone number identical on Google, Bing, Apple Maps, Yelp and Facebook.
- Answer the phone, or have something text people back when you can't.
If those four aren't done, ads will cost more and SEO will take longer.
FAQ
Is AEO a different service from SEO?
For a local trades business, mostly no. Google says its AI features need nothing beyond normal indexing, and the chat tools read the same pages, listings and reviews. The part that is different is measurement: someone has to ask the AI tools real customer questions on a schedule and record who gets named.
How much should an Iowa plumber or HVAC company budget for Google Ads?
Enough to buy at least 10 to 15 leads a month on one service, or you won't learn anything. At LocalIQ's $90.92 average for home and home improvement, that's about $900 to $1,400. Your own cost per lead will show in the account within a few weeks, and that number beats any average.
Can I do the SEO part myself?
Yes, the first part. The four free steps above are SEO, and they cover a lot of ground in a small Iowa town. It gets harder when you need new pages every month and a competitor is paying someone to build theirs.
Find out which problem you have
Most of this decision comes down to one question: where do you stand right now? If Google and the AI tools already name you, your money belongs somewhere else. If they name three competitors and not you, that's the gap to close.
Our free audit answers that in 24 hours. It shows how you rank on Google, whether ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity and Gemini name you or a competitor, and which listings have wrong details. If it turns out you don't need us, the report will say so.
