SearchKings is a lean advertising agency that supports thousands of customers using Cloud Run and Gemini.
SearchKings is a lean advertising agency that supports thousands of customers using Cloud Run and Gemini.
Using an AI-first culture to support a lean team
If you’ve ever needed to find a plumber for that clogged sink or an electrician to fix up a blown fuse, you may have clicked on one of SearchKings’ customers. SearchKings is a search engine marketing agency based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, that works closely with businesses in the home services and legal industries to ensure they can reach the right audiences at the right time.
SearchKings prides itself on delivering transparent, honest results and providing hard-to-find ad performance data to its customers to improve visibility and conversions. This, in turn, means they have a reputation for delivering superior results and high customer satisfaction.
From its inception, SearchKings has been a Google-based business, collaborating through Google Workspace and building the early versions of its platform offerings with Firebase.
As the company has grown, a small team of account managers needed help to support a fast growing number of customers. In order to help this team with thousands of accounts, SearchKings needed new tools.
While customers can log into their SearchKings app to view performance reporting and lead quality, the agency’s real value and service is derived from a hands-on, personalized journey that’s monitored by their account manager.
Offering that tailored experience led SearchKings to expand the scope of its work with Google Cloud to develop a powerful operating system called “Ease,” that provides everything from CRM functionality to campaign management, performance monitoring, and even financial operations solutions in one place.
We have a little over 100 employees but thousands of customers. The only way we can maintain that ratio is through the platform that we build, and for that, we use Google Cloud.
Ross Lavery
CTO, SearchKings
Delivering more customer value by shifting from
data analysis to decision-making
The company needed to build and scale Ease quickly as it was growing from hundreds to thousands of customers. Initially, the team selected Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) which provided the flexible environment SearchKings needed to build a robust AI platform. With Cloud Run and Cloud SQL, however, SearchKings accelerated their development as the small team preferred its simplicity, auto-scaling, and speed. “Cloud Run was a perfect fit for us because it abstracted away a lot of the maintenance,” says Ross Lavery, CTO at SearchKings. “That means our team can focus on building and deploying rather than spending time on issues or outages, and that goes a long way when we want to allocate those resources carefully.”
With Ease available, SearchKings’ account managers have access to a number of proprietary tools to help customers better target keywords. The platform’s “Negative Keyword Suggestion” tool, for example, has completely changed how SearchKings manages negative keywords. In the past, account managers would have to manually review negative keywords, search terms that customers should exclude from their campaigns to better optimize results, and offer suggestions. This process was tedious, taking anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes per account per month.
Since Ease is powered by Gemini (both 3.1 Flash and 3.1 Pro), those account managers now have access to a dashboard with recommendations built based on a number of factors such as the customer’s vertical or the geographic areas they target. Gemini ingests these data points and suggests the top search terms it believes should be negated. The team reviews those suggestions and either approves or rejects them, keeping a human in the loop but reducing time spent to an average of five minutes.
We have a large number of small customers which means we need to run tens of thousands of performance reports every day. Google Cloud was the natural choice for making that possible, and Firebase was a great introduction to the larger ecosystem.
Ross Lavery
CTO, SearchKings
A lean agency built for scale through collaboration
SearchKings’ relationship with Google goes beyond simply adopting technology, it’s one built on consistent collaboration. “We use Google Cloud solutions. We use Workspace. Our developers use Gemini CLI. But more than that, we feel the value of being a partner with Google. They’re super hands-on, offer support, and always help us find the answers we need,” Lavery adds.
As a Google Ads Partner, the team is excited to continue to deepen their connection to the Google ecosystem. SearchKings has recently implemented agentic AI into their already accelerated workflows. By finding more ways to automate analysis or data aggregation, the team can focus their energy on calling their customers or developing new features behind the scenes.
Ultimately, customers may also have the ability to self-serve more frequently by chatting with a SearchKings agent, and for more complex issues, those same agents can provide the team valuable context quickly.
“With greater context, we can better serve our customers at every point in their journey with us,” says Lavery. “We can also solve problems proactively which builds customer confidence, reduces churn, and makes us a better partner. We’re looking forward to what else we can build with Google Cloud.”
We use Google Cloud solutions. We use Workspace. Our developers use Gemini CLI. But more than that, we feel the value of being a partner with Google. They’re super hands-on, offer support, and always help us find the answers we need.
Ross Lavery
CTO, SearchKings
SearchKings is a digital advertising agency that focuses on lead generation campaigns for small and mid-size businesses.
Industry: Technology
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Products: Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Firebase, Gemini 3.1 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Google Ads, Cloud CLI, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
