Should I pause the ads until the site is fixed?

If the landing page converts under 2% and loads slowly, yes: every dollar is buying a worse result than it will after the fix. A one-page landing page can be built faster than a full site.

Can RankMeHi run the ads?

Yes, and we judge the account on booked jobs, not clicks. For local service businesses the partner deal can replace the retainer: the site and the tracking are built at cost and you pay per approved lead.

What is a normal cost per lead?

It depends on the trade and the city. The useful comparison is your average job: a lead that costs under 5% of the job is cheap, which is the rule our own per-lead prices follow.

Problem · diagnosis and fix

Every click costs more. Every lead costs double.

A high cost per lead is rarely an ads problem alone. It is the price of a click multiplied by every visitor who arrived, waited, and left without calling.

Get the free audit See the fix

59%
pass four basics: HTTPS, mobile viewport, tap-to-call, and a form or booking
RankMeHi study of 662 Orange County business websites. Crawl 25 to 26 Sep 2026; PageSpeed Insights, mobile, 26 Sep 2026.
4
usual causes, each with its own fix below
Each cause is checked in the fix below
Free
audit that tells you which cause is yours, in writing
Every engagement starts with it

Sound familiar?

How it shows up.

Click-through rate is fine, conversion rate is under 3%
The campaign sends every click to the homepage
You cannot say which keyword produced last month’s best job

Root causes

The 4 reasons it happens.

Figures are from our study of 662 local business websites in Orange County, tested in September 2026.

01
The landing page is the homepage
Someone searching "emergency AC repair" lands on a page about the company history. The message does not match the search, and the visitor leaves.
02
The page is slow
Paid visitors are impatient. A four-second load on a phone wastes a share of every dollar before the page even appears.
03
No call tracking
Without a tracking number and form attribution, you cannot tell which keywords produce jobs, so the budget goes to the ones that produce clicks.
04
Broad keywords
Terms that look relevant bring research traffic. Buyer searches cost more per click and far less per job.

The fix

What to do, in order.

Each step is something you can check or ask for today. The free audit does the checking for you and puts the answer in writing.

01
One landing page per service
Step 1
The headline repeats the search, the number is tap-to-call, the form is short. Nothing else.
You getA cause you can rule in or out.
02
Track calls and forms back to keywords
Step 2
A tracking number per campaign and a form that records its source, wired into the ads account.
You getA cause you can rule in or out.
03
Cut to buyer keywords
Step 3
Fewer, more expensive clicks that end in jobs beat cheap clicks that end nowhere.
You getA cause you can rule in or out.
04
Fix the speed under the ads
Step 4
A fast page lifts conversion on every campaign at once; it is the cheapest change in the account.
You getA site that produces enquiries you can count.

Questions

Questions about this problem.

: If the landing page converts under 2% and loads slowly, yes: every dollar is buying a worse result than it will after the fix. A one-page landing page can be built faster than a full site.
: Yes, and we judge the account on booked jobs, not clicks. For local service businesses the partner deal can replace the retainer: the site and the tracking are built at cost and you pay per approved lead.
: It depends on the trade and the city. The useful comparison is your average job: a lead that costs under 5% of the job is cheap, which is the rule our own per-lead prices follow.