October 14, 2026
If you run Google Ads for a trade business based in the Sutherland Shire and your campaign targets "Sydney", you are paying for clicks from Parramatta, Penrith and the Northern Beaches that will never become jobs. I see this on almost every account I audit, and it is usually the single biggest leak in the budget.
Here is the thing about the Shire that no national ads guide will tell you: it behaves like an island. There are only a few ways in and out, over Tom Uglys Bridge, Captain Cook Bridge, or down the Princes Highway through Sutherland. Nobody in Sans Souci is booking a Caringbah plumber for a Tuesday callout, and nobody in Engadine is waiting for a sparky to fight their way down from Rockdale. Trades work both ways across that water about as often as Shire locals holiday in Cronulla. Which is to say, never.
Set your location targeting to the Shire itself, not a radius. A 15km radius from Caringbah drags in Brighton-Le-Sands, Kogarah and half of St George, and Google will happily spend your money there. Use the actual suburb list instead: Cronulla, Caringbah, Miranda, Sutherland, Engadine, Menai, Gymea, Kirrawee, Taren Point, and the rest. It takes ten minutes and it instantly stops the bleed.
Then look at how people here actually search. Shire locals search with their suburb in the query far more than the metro average, because they have learnt that "plumber near me" serves them someone from the other side of the bridge. "Plumber Engadine", "electrician Caringbah", "tree removal Menai". Those suburb terms are cheaper than the Sydney-wide equivalents, convert better, and your competitors on the big generic terms are mostly agencies bidding on behalf of franchise groups with no one actually based here.
One more local wrinkle. The Shire splits into two catchments that behave differently: the eastern beach side (Cronulla, Caringbah, Miranda, Gymea) and the western bush side (Engadine, Menai, Heathcote, Sutherland). Jobs, travel times and even price tolerance differ between them. If you only have capacity to service one side well, target one side. A tight campaign that owns Menai beats a thin one that annoys the whole postcode map.
A Shire trade campaign done properly usually has: suburb-level ad groups with the suburb in the headline, location targeting set to "presence" rather than "interest" (so you exclude people in Perth searching about the Shire), callout extensions with your actual base suburb, and negative keywords for every St George and Illawarra suburb your van will not visit. None of that is clever. It is just local knowledge applied with discipline, and it routinely halves the cost of a booked job.
If you want a second opinion on your own account, I will tell you inside twenty minutes where the budget is leaking. No deck, no lock-in, just the numbers.
