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Why my seo and google ads no longer deliver quality leads?
Posted by on April 25, 2026 at 1:15 pm25 years ago, I started a cleaning company and, being one of the few with a website at the time, I gained a lot of clients. Many of whom I still work with today. Essentially the business has lived off the momentum of that simple website for 25 years.
Today I spend over 10.000€ per year on Google Ads and link building, yet I can only dream of getting the kind of high quality contacts I used to receive back then.
I’m not complaining that those 10.000€ don’t produce the same results I achieved for free decades ago (I understand that back then I had no competition, so it was normal that everyone found only me). What concerns me instead is the very low quality of the inquiries I receive.
I believe the issues are the following:
- Being ranked 1st or at least 2nd/3rd for major national keywords brings in requests from all over Italy
- With Google Ads, even after limiting the radius to just a few dozen kilometers and always appearing first (since I’m the top bidder), the quality is still very low
What can I do if both SEO and Google Ads have stopped working?
Is this normal? -
1 Reply
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The problem is keyword intent. Broad cleaning keywords attract everyone, not your ideal client. Get specific with your targeting. Use keywords like “commercial cleaning contracts” and add aggressive negative keywords to filter out residential and one time requests. Your landing page should also speak directly to commercial clients only.
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What kind of quality issues are you seeing? Complete spam, wrong services, wrong gro, etc.
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Right now in SEO there is a big shift to also looking to improve in the LLMs (AI tools). SEO is still important but people search differently now. Likewise I know you mentioned link building but are you also doing work on your Google business profile? Definitely don’t ignore that. Updating photos often, consistent review generation, making posts, etc.
On Google ads be very specific. I saw in another comment that you are using exact match. Well unfortunately exact match is not what it used to be. Take a look at your search terms and make sure you are negating irrelevant terms often.
Happy to take a deep dive for ya (not a sales pitch) and give more advice after taking a look at what’s actually going on. We do free deep dives and consults all the time
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You likely don’t spend enough to see the kind of business you want.
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top bid catches every random clicker too, dropping to position 2-3 and adding a budget qualifier on the contact form filtered out most of the junk inquiries on my end
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Could be many things in Google Ads, but the number one thing you can do is give better conversion signals.
Best way to do that is import offline conversion data, MQL, SQL, or sales.
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yeah, pretty normal if broad traffic is mixing homeowners, one-off jobs and people outside your real area
i’d check 4 things first:
– search terms report, not just keywords
– negative list for residential / cheap / one-time intent
– landing page copy that says exactly who you serve
– offline conversion import so google learns which leads turned into real jobsif the account is still optimizing to form fills, it’ll keep finding more low-quality form fills
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