Three structural causes. Two of them are inside your business.
Category: Bad LSA Leads
Cause 1: Response Speed
LSA's algorithm watches how fast you respond to leads and factors it directly into your ad rank. More importantly, so does the homeowner. An HVAC lead submitted at 2pm on a Thursday is likely comparing two or three contractors simultaneously. The one who calls first wins — not the one with the best review count or the most polished profile. If your average response time is 30 minutes, you're not losing a quality battle; you're losing a speed battle. The fix: set up an automated text acknowledgment within 60 seconds of lead submission and a live call-back within five minutes. This is entirely within your control and costs nothing but process.
Cause 2: Profile Signals
LSA uses your GBP signals to determine who sees your ads. Review velocity, recency, and category accuracy all affect which searches your ads are eligible for and how often they appear. A contractor running LSA with 40 reviews, the most recent from three months ago, will have worse ad visibility than a competitor with 120 reviews and a consistent posting cadence — even at the same bid level. The fix: treat your GBP as an active channel, not a directory entry. Two new reviews per week and one GBP post per week will visibly improve LSA performance within 30 days.
Cause 3: Service-Mix Targeting
LSA lets you choose which services you're bidding on — and many contractors either haven't revisited that list in months or defaulted to "everything" during setup. If you're bidding on services you don't want to book or services you're not competitive on, you're getting the leads you bid for. An electrical contractor who left "panel upgrades" in their service mix but doesn't want those calls anymore will keep getting those calls until someone turns it off. The fix: audit your active service categories quarterly. Remove anything you don't want to book or can't competitively price. Tighten to your five highest-margin services.
If you fix all three of these and lead quality is still consistently bad, that's a market-fit problem — not an LSA problem. But most contractors who complain about LSA lead quality haven't addressed response speed or service targeting. Start there.