Location targeting for trades: stop paying for clicks outside your area

Presence, or presence or interest

When you choose locations in Google Ads, you also choose which people in those locations count. There are two options:

• Presence or interest: people in, regularly in, or who have shown interest in your targeted locations. This is Google’s default, and the option Google recommends.
• Presence: people in or regularly in your targeted locations.

For most local trades we use presence. “Interest” can include people elsewhere in the country who are reading about your area, and for a business that only works within an hour of its yard, many of those clicks are wasted.

There is a trade-off. Presence also leaves out people who live elsewhere but need work done locally, such as someone arranging a repair at a parent’s house. If that kind of job matters to you, a separate campaign for searches that name your towns can catch them without opening everything up.

Radius or postcodes

A radius around your base is the quickest set-up, but it ignores how you actually travel. It crosses estuaries, takes in towns on the far side of a motorway you never cross, and treats a rural village and a busy town centre the same.

Postcode districts take longer to set up but match real travel far better. Most trades know exactly which districts they want and which they avoid, and that knowledge is worth more than a circle on a map.

Exclude what you never cover

Exclusions remove places inside your targeted area that you do not want, such as a city centre with parking you will not deal with, or a district you have decided not to work in. By default, Google excludes people who are likely to be located in the places you exclude.

Exclusions are also the quickest fix when you spot a pattern of enquiries from somewhere you do not want to go.

Check where the money actually went

Google Ads reports show the locations your ads were shown in and where the clicks came from. Look at them once your campaigns have been running for a few weeks. If a noticeable share of spend is landing outside your area, the settings need tightening, whatever they say on paper.

Your enquiry log helps here too. If you record the postcode for each enquiry, out-of-area ones show up straight away. How we track enquiries.

Match your Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile has its own service areas, separate from your ad settings, and it is worth keeping the two consistent. Google lets a service-area business list up to 20 service areas, and says the overall area should not be more than about two hours’ drive from where the business is based. If you do not serve customers at your business address, Google says to remove that address from your profile.

This matters more from 2027, when Local Services Ads in the UK move into Google Ads and start taking your business details from your Google Business Profile. What changes in the move.

Town names in searches

Plenty of people type a town into their search: “roofer Harrogate”, “boiler repair Worcester”. Those searches are a strong sign of intent, and having the towns you cover in your keywords, ads and landing pages helps you win them.

Watch for towns that share a name with somewhere far away, and for nearby towns you do not actually serve. Both belong on the negative keyword list. Negative keywords for home improvement.

A quick checklist

1. Choose presence or presence or interest deliberately, and know why.
2. Target the postcode districts you really cover, not just a radius.
3. Exclude the places inside that area you never want to go.
4. Check the location reports after a few weeks, and record postcodes in your enquiry log.
5. Keep your Google Business Profile service areas consistent with your ads.
6. Use the towns you cover in keywords and pages, and exclude the ones you do not.

Location settings are one of the first things we check in a campaign review.