How Sponsored Search Can Help Attract Customers to Local Businesses

Local businesses make their dollars from the community, regardless of the community size. Typically, the population correlates to the amount of competition. Sure, the more people you have in your town, the more opportunity there is, however, there's often more businesses in the same field in bigger cities.

Whether you're starting your own PPC campaign or working with a reputable agency, it's important to understand the difference between PPC and SEO. Pay-per-click is a form of advertisements where business owners create optimized online advertisements to reach a wider audience and pay a specified amount per click. Search engine optimization, on the other hand, is the process of getting organic traffic from search engine users through best practices, like including relevant keywords in your blog content. You can also create a local SEO plan that focuses on using geo-focused keywords in your marketing.

One of the best ways to help get ahead of your competitors is through a PPC sponsored search. There are several key elements of a sponsored search: keyword management, ad quality scores, and effective call to actions among them. Overall, the goal of pay-per-click advertising is to help your business become more easily discovered by search engine users. If done correctly, local business can really shine with sponsored searches.

Using The Right Keywords To Attract People

As a business owner, you want people to be able to search for your product or service type and have your business appear in those sponsored results. Let's say you run a mosquito termination company in a temperate climate state like Florida. There's likely many other businesses that have the same type of service as well, and therefore use the same keywords. This makes those keywords highly competitive and more expensive for the advertiser. The key is to find a good balance between competitive keywords and narrow, ultra-targeted keywords.

Understanding Keyword Targeting

There are two types of targeting options within AdWords: geo-targeting and keyword targeting. Geo-targeting is based on the location of the search (using IP addresses) while keywords target specific, relevant words and phrases. Through geo-targeting, you don't have to waste your budget on unwanted clicks. A combination of both targeting methods will likely yield a higher ROI. For example, you might want to target "Tampa mosquito termination companies" for country-wide searches, as well as geo-target phrases only to certain areas.

Perhaps two local campaigns and two nationwide campaigns would work best, however, your local campaign should be your number one priority. You may even want to target specific locations for certain neighborhoods. If you had a business in Brooklyn, New York, you could target a specific neighborhood like Park Slope. This type of targeting would appeal to those specifically in those neighborhoods looking for nearby places of business. Results will vary from company to company, but if you pay close attention to your analytics and split test properly, you'll find the right combination that produces the highest results.

By default, AdWords campaigns are set to target users who are in your area or searching for services in your area. Local businesses can take advantage of advanced location targeting to show sponsored searches to the most relevant users. In the advanced area, be sure to check off the "people in my targeted location" box.

Using Google Trends to Gain Better Insights

Google Trends can tell you plenty about where your customers are, and where you should be focusing your efforts. Most importantly, Google Trends will show you where your keywords are most popular. If you search for "mosquito termination," Google will produce a map displaying the cities and states where that service is most desired. If you had products in the mosquito termination niche, you could target those areas well, while still focusing on local areas for services that require site visits. After you've analyzed trends, there are many tools that can help you come up with lists, such as local keyword auto generator.

Take A Look At Your Local Competitors

By analyzing your competitor strategies, you can pump up your existing methods to help attract even more customers to your local business. The key is to see what types of campaigns they're running and keywords they're targeting. There are several tools for competitor analysis, including SEMRush, iSpionage, and SpyFu.

These are paid tools, but they allow you to see a sample of metrics and information about the campaigns of your competitors before purchasing an appropriate plan. This iSpionage blog post shows users how to identify their biggest competition in the AdWords space, and even view and swipe the keywords of their competitors.

Royce Calvin

Royce is a writer for PowerHomeBiz.com. He is as passionate about Internet Marketing as he is with his ever-present cup of Starbucks coffee.

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Tags: featured, How to Market Online, How to Rank in the Search Engines, Online Marketing Basics, Online Marketing strategy, Search Engine Marketing

Category: Search Engine Optimization

Source: How Sponsored Search Can Help Attract Customers to Local Businesses