Sector: automotive
Google Ads for Birmingham garages, body shops and dealers
The MOT, the service and the search with a job in it
Birmingham has a long motor trade and a lot of garages competing for the same MOT. The account is built on the searches that have a job attached, MOT plus the suburb, service by make, a named repair, tyres by size, and, since 2021, the Clean Air Zone questions nobody else answers, and it excludes the parts, manual and job searches that share the same words on the first day. Calls and online bookings are the conversions; the radius is set from where the cars actually come from. From £249 a month, one business per kind per area.
Search intent
What each kind of automotive search is worth, and how it is run
| Search | Who is typing it | Run as | Judged on |
|---|---|---|---|
| "MOT Tyseley", "MOT near me" | A driver with a date on the reminder, choosing on price and slot | Its own campaign, the price in the ad, online booking on the page | Bookings and calls, cost per booking |
| "BMW service Birmingham", "Audi specialist" | An owner who wants a specialist and will drive further for one | Campaign by make, wider radius, page per make | Calls over a minute and booking forms |
| "clutch replacement", "cambelt", "diagnostics" | A driver with a fault and a quote in mind | Repair campaign, ads naming the job and the turnaround | Calls; the report asks which became jobs |
| "tyres 205/55 R16 Birmingham" | Someone with the size written down, buying today | Tyre campaign, size in the ad, fitting slot on the page | Bookings and calls, same day |
| "Clean Air Zone compliant", "CAZ check" | A driver worried about the daily charge | A small explainer campaign with a checker page | Calls and retrofit enquiries; cheap, and usually uncontested |
| "used Ford Focus Birmingham" | A buyer with a budget and a model | Dealer campaign from the stock feed, one ad per car in stock | Test drive requests and calls, with the car's value attached |
| "car parts", "workshop manual", "mechanic jobs" | Not a customer | Excluded from day one | The pounds they no longer cost |
The Clean Air Zone
A stream of searches most Birmingham garages leave to the council website
Birmingham's Clean Air Zone has charged non-compliant cars, vans and taxis to enter the city centre since June 2021. Drivers search for whether their vehicle is affected, what the charge is, and what can be done, and the answers they find are mostly the council's pages and news stories. A garage that answers the question plainly on its own page, with a vehicle check and an honest word about retrofits and alternatives, gets an enquiry from a driver who is already thinking about spending money on the car.
The campaign is small, the clicks are cheap because few garages bid on them, and it is measured like everything else: calls and enquiries, not visits.
Dealers
One ad per car in stock, gone when the car is
A dealer's Search campaign is built from the stock feed, so a search for a used Focus in Birmingham sees an ad for the Focus on the forecourt, with its price, and the ad stops the day the car is sold. Searches by make, model and body type are grouped so a Fiesta click is not paid for at Range Rover prices, and the aftersales campaign, MOT, service and parts for the makes you sell, runs separately with its own budget.
Test-drive requests and calls count as enquiries; sales are imported at month end so the bidding learns which searches actually sold cars rather than which produced forms.
The radius
Two radiuses on most garage accounts
People will not drive past three garages for an MOT. They will drive across the city for a specialist. The account has a campaign for each.
- MOT, servicing, tyres
- Two or three miles, or the postcode districts around the workshop. The ad names the suburb; the page shows the price and the next free slot.
- A make you specialise in
- The whole conurbation, with the make in every headline. Solihull, Sutton Coldfield and the Black Country are all within the drive an owner makes for a specialist.
- Body shop and accident repair
- Wide, because the car is usually collected, and the searcher is often an insurer's customer with a choice of repairer.
- Remapping, tuning, detailing
- Wide again, and often beyond the West Midlands, because the searcher is choosing on reputation rather than distance.
Something real
The motor trade site we have already built and measured
The one automotive result we can show is a search result rather than a Google Ads one, and the results page says so. A vehicle remapping business in Chester had a new site built by Webso Digital in July 2026; Google measured it at 98 out of 100 for mobile speed, it reached the map pack in five weeks, and its clicks from Google rose from 7 to 42 in a month against the month before. Small numbers, honestly reported. The relevance here is that the page an ad lands on is the same kind of page, built the same way.
Keep reading
Next door to this page
Trades
The same phone-led account for plumbers, electricians and roofers.
Landing pages
An MOT page with the price and the booking slot in the first screen.
Pricing
Independent garages sit on Starter; dealers on Growth or Scale.
Get a quote
Send the workshop address and the makes you work on; the reply says what an MOT click costs there.
Questions from Birmingham garages and dealers
What does Google Ads cost for a Birmingham garage?
£249 a month on the Starter tier for ad spend up to £1,000, which is where most independent garages, body shops and tyre fitters sit. A dealer group with used-car and aftersales campaigns across several sites is Growth at £399 or Scale at £599. The nearest public benchmark for the clicks, LocaliQ and WordStream on 1 June 2026, put automotive repair and service at $4.35 a click on average in mostly American accounts; your Birmingham figure comes from Keyword Planner.
Which searches should a garage pay for?
The ones with a job attached: MOT with the suburb, service by make, a named repair such as clutch or cambelt, tyres by size, diagnostics, and the Clean Air Zone compliance questions. "Garage near me" is worth a small campaign; searches for car parts, manuals, jobs and salvage are excluded on day one.
How do you handle the Clean Air Zone?
As its own small campaign. Since June 2021 non-compliant vehicles pay to enter the city centre, and drivers search for what that means for their car and what a garage can do. A page that explains the zone plainly, checks the vehicle and offers the retrofit or the alternative converts well and costs little, because most garages ignore the searches.
Can you track calls and bookings?
Yes. Calls over about a minute from a tracked number on the page and from the call button on the ad count as enquiries; online MOT and service bookings count from the booking confirmation with the value attached. At month end you tell us roughly which enquiries became jobs, and the account is told to buy more of those.
Do dealers get a different account from garages?
Yes. A dealer's money is in used-car searches by make and model, with a stock feed so each car can be advertised while it is in stock and dropped when it sells, plus a separate aftersales campaign that looks like a garage's. The two never share a budget, because a used-car click and an MOT click are worth very different amounts.
Is remapping or tuning a problem for Google's policies?
Not in itself, but the ads must not claim anything that would breach Google's policies or the CAP Code, and the page must say plainly what is legal for road use. We have built and ranked a remapping business's website in Chester, so the wording is familiar; the numbers from that site are on the results page with their caveats.
Our garage is in Tyseley. How wide should the radius be?
Narrower than you think for MOT and servicing, where people rarely drive past three other garages, and wider for a specialism such as a make you are known for, a body shop or a tuning service, where they will. We usually run two campaigns with two radiuses and let the search terms report show where the enquiries actually come from.
Do you take one garage per area?
One business per kind per area on the monthly plans: one independent garage in Tyseley, one body shop in Erdington, one tyre fitter in Solihull. Two garages half a mile apart would be bidding against each other with the same person setting both bids, and we will not do that.
Send the workshop address and what you specialise in. The reply says what the clicks cost and whether your area is open.
If ads are already running, add the customer ID and the free check reads how much of last month went on parts, manuals and job searches.