If You Had $100,000 to Spend on Marketing This Year, Would You Put It All in Google Ads?

Written By kirby blandino

We get asked a version of this question constantly: "Should I just put my whole budget into Google Ads?"

Our answer, since no accurate data exists, is to make a business decision with the best information possible.

Below is what we came up with and hope it helps.

It's the natural question. Google Ads is the channel every business owner already understands — you pay, you show up, you get calls. It's simple. It's fast. And it's exactly why so many home services businesses over-concentrate their entire marketing budget there.

So we ran a straightforward test. If a local home services business owner had $100,000 to spend on marketing this year, what's the actual smartest way to split it? We put the question to independent AI research the same way we do for every article on this site — and asked it to think like a consultant advising a real owner, using published home services marketing benchmarks rather than a generic answer.

The result wasn't "spend it all on ads." It wasn't "spend it all on SEO" either. It was a deliberate split, and the reasoning behind the split is the part worth paying attention to.

The rough breakdown that came back

  • 25–35% on Google Ads and Local Services Ads — the "now money." Immediate, high-intent leads. This is your fastest lever, and it's the one you can turn up or down.

  • 25–35% on local SEO and your Google Business Profile — the "future money." This is what gets you into the map 3-pack and keeps you there, and it's what lowers your cost per lead over the following 12 to 24 months.

  • 10–20% on your website and conversion optimization — because a click that doesn't convert into a booked job is money wasted regardless of which channel sent it.

  • 10–15% on content and authority building — service pages, FAQs, video. This is the layer that compounds and that AI search tools read when deciding who to recommend.

  • 5–10% on reviews, retention, and referrals — the channel with the lowest cost and the highest trust, and the one most businesses underfund.

  • 5–10% held back for testing new channels — because the landscape keeps shifting and a business that never experiments falls behind one that does.

Google or any Algorithm does not know your exact outcome. It only knows its own ranking factors.

Why not just put it all in ads?

The honest answer, and the one that matters most: Google Ads gets more expensive the longer you rely on it exclusively. You're renting attention every month, not building anything that stays. The businesses that win long-term treat paid ads as the fast lane — useful, necessary even — but they build local SEO, reviews, and content underneath it so their cost per lead actually goes down over time instead of climbing every year the way pure ad spend tends to.

That's the same principle behind the dashboard problem we've written about before. A Google Ads dashboard will tell you your cost per click. It won't tell you whether that click turned into a five-star review, a repeat customer, or a referral six months later. Those outcomes come from a different part of the budget entirely — the part most businesses underfund because it doesn't show up in a weekly report.

What this means if you're deciding where to put your next dollar

You don't need to abandon Google Ads. You need to stop treating it as the whole strategy. If you're spending $100,000 or $10,000, the ratio matters more than the total — roughly a third on immediate lead flow, and the rest on the things that make each of those leads worth more over time: your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your website, and staying in touch with the customers you already have.

If you want to see where your own spend currently sits against this kind of split, that's exactly the conversation we can have on the first call.

We provide the best information not a crystal ball.

Test, test, test. See what works.

In other words, we take directional data. Executed in your own business and see the results.

We asked Perplexity, then had Claude AI verify the sourcing. Here's the best answer we could give you. The percentages above are a synthesis across multiple industry sources, not one single study. Sources vary — some lean more toward paid ads, others toward SEO — and no two agencies agree on an exact ratio. What's consistent is the underlying principle: relying on ads alone raises your cost per lead over time; building SEO, reviews, and content alongside it brings that cost down. Treat the split as directional guidance, not a formula. What you actually do with your $100,000 is your call.

kirby blandino
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