Best for: Week 1 strategy · Week 8 capstone
Source of truth: Kathmandu home services stack · Google Ads layer · Local SEO layer

The Challenge: Bleeding Budget on Broad Searches

When marketing home services (like plumbing, electrical, or cleaning) in Kathmandu, businesses often fall into a common trap. They throw money at Google Ads but end up paying for clicks from people searching for “how to fix a leaky pipe myself” or, worse, funding accidental clicks on competitor names.

At the same time, their local map listings are neglected. Because of this, they miss out on the easiest, most cost-effective leads of all: the people pulling out their phones and searching for a service “near me.”

We needed to fix this for a local home services provider. Rather than relying on a single channel, we built a “Stack”—a two-layer approach using Google Ads for immediate, high-intent jobs, and Local SEO to build a sustainable pipeline of local leads.

Layer A: Cleaning Up Google Ads (The 90-Day Fix)

Our first priority was stopping the wasted ad spend. The existing Search campaigns were buying traffic, but it was the wrong traffic.

We cleaned up the account by aggressively adding negative keywords and hyper-focusing the budget strictly on emergency and high-intent jobs. If a search didn’t show a clear intent to hire a professional immediately, we stopped bidding on it.

The 90-Day Ads Outcome:

  • Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): Dropped by 42%, from NPR 4,722 down to a highly profitable NPR 2,571.
  • Monthly Conversions: Increased from 18 to 28 qualified jobs per month.

By cutting out the DIYers and competitor waste, we didn’t just save money—we bought better jobs.

Layer B: Building the Local SEO Engine (The 6-Month Play)

While the Ads were busy catching the immediate, emergency jobs, we spent six months building out a strong Local SEO presence in the background.

This involved fully optimizing their Google Business Profile (GBP) and building dedicated, localized service pages on their website. The goal was to capture the “near me” and brand demand organically, without having to pay Google for every single click.

The 6-Month SEO Outcome:

  • Organic Traffic: Grew massively from 450 to 2,847 visits per month.
  • Qualified Leads: Tripled, jumping from an average of 12–15 a month to 42–48 a month.

The Stack Logic: Why We Don’t Blend the Math

The secret to this strategy isn’t just that the numbers went up—it’s how we measure them. In the digital marketing industry, it’s tempting to mash all these metrics together to create a single, inflated “Blended ROAS” (Return on Ad Spend) to make the campaign look like magic.

We don’t do that. We look at the layers separately because they do two entirely different jobs:

  1. Local SEO & Google Business Profiles act as the foundation, capturing the daily, local “near me” demand efficiently and cheaply.
  2. Google Ads act as a scalpel, specifically buying the emergency and high-value jobs that organic search might miss on any given day.

By stacking them side-by-side, you don’t just get more leads. You build a resilient customer acquisition system that doesn’t rely on just one platform’s algorithm to keep the lights on.

Capstone exercise

Allocate NPR 150,000/month across Search, Meta, and “organic ops” (content/GBP time). Defend with Layer A and Layer B citations — no fictional stack ROAS.