Why am I getting Local Services Ads leads for work I don't do?
Almost always because a job type is switched on that you did not intend, or Google added or renamed categories under your service and the defaults enabled them. Job types map customer intents to your profile, and they are broader than the labels suggest. Audit the full list rather than the summary, re-check after any category change, and dispute the leads that got through while the misconfiguration was live.
Job types are intent buckets, not your service menu
The labels look like services, so people read them as a menu of what they offer. They are closer to buckets of customer phrasing. A single job type can absorb a wide range of how customers describe a problem, including phrasings you would never use for that work. That is why enabling something that sounds adjacent to your business quietly opens a channel of calls you cannot serve.
It is worth reading every enabled job type aloud and asking whether you would dispatch a truck for the worst-case interpretation of that phrase. If the answer is no, turn it off and watch the volume change before turning it back on.
Categories change under you
Google restructures Local Services categories periodically. New job types appear inside a category you already run, and depending on how the change is applied, they may arrive enabled. Nobody sends you a memo about it. The symptom is a sudden run of odd calls with no change on your end.
Build a recurring audit into the calendar, not into somebody's memory. Monthly is enough for most accounts, weekly during a season where volume matters. The same discipline applies across every ad platform you run, which is one reason home services marketing ends up being a configuration-management job as much as a creative one.
Diagnose from the transcripts, not the labels
The fastest way to find a bad job type is to read what callers actually asked for. Pull the transcripts of the calls that went nowhere and cluster them by requested service.
- One dominant unwanted request. A single job type is the culprit. Find it and disable it.
- Scattered unrelated requests. More likely a spam or lead-reseller problem than a configuration problem.
- Right service, wrong scale. Residential shop receiving commercial inquiries usually means a category that does not distinguish the two. That is a qualification-script problem, not a settings problem.
Fix the setting, then clean up the leads
Disable first, because every hour it stays on costs another charged lead. Then go back through the charged leads from the affected window and file wrong-service credits with specifics from the recording, which is far more likely to be granted than a vague note.
At any real volume this deserves to be automatic. Transcripts can be classified by requested service and compared against your enabled job types, so a mismatch raises a flag the same day rather than at month end. That kind of always-on check is what an integration layer is built to do, using the same call analysis you already run for coaching.
Topics: LSA · job types · configuration · lead quality
Have a version of this question about your own business?
The useful answer usually depends on which systems you run and how they're connected. That's a conversation, not a blog post.