Do Local Business Owners Need A Presence Online?
Some local business owners claim that the internet offers nothing special to their business. And to be fair, some of them have a point. But their situations are rarities, and for the majority of local business owners, an absence online will place them at a severe disadvantage.
Think about this for a second ? In North America, there are 272 million people online. ?97% of them will find and research the product/service they need on the internet. So for the majority of local business owners, I would suggest they begin working on creating an online presence to ensure they don?t fall behind.
In this write-up, I?m going to go through a fairly detailed step-by-step tutorial of how one local business owner can generate business online using Google AdWords.
Intense Tennis
Let?s pretend you own a tennis instruction company called Intense Tennis. Your company has a network of dedicated instructors across Los Angeles providing lessons on tennis courts from Santa Monica to Cerritos. You have a nice website, and you decide that it?s time to aggressively market your company by launching a Google AdWords campaign.
Step 1 ? Register Your Business in Every Directory
Free traffic is the best traffic right? So before we get into AdWords, the first thing you should do is to increase the visibility of your business within the natural search results. Register your business in free directories like?Google Places, Yahoo! Local, Bing Local, City Search, etc. It?s evident in the screenshot below that businesses registered with Google Places will show up near the top quite frequently (for e-commerce companies, make sure to insert a data feed into?Google Products). Placing your link in these directories could generate massive traffic while helping your SEO link-building campaigns.
Fig. 1
Step 2 ? Keyword Research
Put some thought into it, and you?ll realize there are two ways people will search for your service. Based on these two ways, you?ll have to create two separate campaigns:
1) Because searchers have gotten used to Google?s automatic location detection technology, searchers may use generic keywords like ?tennis lessons? to find your business. These searchers are trusting Google to generate relevant pages based on their location. *Before you decide to rely on this technology, there are a few kinks Google hasn?t worked out yet. As I?m writing this tutorial in Long Beach, Google is claiming I?m in San Diego. That?s a 100 mile difference!
2) People like me will search a little more precisely. If I were looking for a tennis instructor, I would use the keywords ?tennis lessons cerritos.? Also, people may be searching for your service away from home, which is why they won?t rely on the automatic location detector from Google.
After you complete your keyword research, you?ll find there are plenty of other keywords to consider like ?tennis instructor? ?tennis teacher? and ?tennis pro,? just to name a few.
Step 3 ? Under Campaign Settings, Geographically Target Los Angeles
This is the easiest (but most important) step in order to setup your campaign so that it?s shown only within your region. You don?t want your ad to show up randomly in Cleveland, New York, or even San Diego, so eliminate the sure-fire certainty of wasting the searcher?s time and your money by showing ads outside of your zone. Targeting Los Angeles will ensure you don?t waste any clicks.
Fig. 2
As you already know, there are plenty of cities within the Los Angeles Metropolitan. If you want to get really specific, go beyond this and create more campaigns to begin targeting other cities within your zone. For example, you can create separate campaigns for Long Beach, Santa Monica, Venice, Brentwood, Bel Air, etc. Each subsequent campaign will be a complete mirror to the one shown above except the zoning and ad copy.?
Step 4 ? Create Plenty of Ad Groups within Your Campaigns
The keywords you generated are all pointing towards one service, which in most cases would require one campaign. But for this local AdWords campaign, we?re going to create two campaigns. The reasons for this will be clear shortly.
For Campaign 1: Los Angeles (Generic Search), we?re going to create ad groups for searchers who are relying on Google?s location detector to generate relevant results. Under campaign settings, ensure Google will trigger your advertisement only to searchers within the city limits of Los Angeles. Take a look at your keyword list and based on the common theme, begin to group them together. These groups will encompass separate ad groups. In figure 3, note that I included only four incomplete ad groups because this is a fictional campaign. Upon completion of your keyword research, you should have a lot more ad groups than four. As far as keywords go, Google will generally recommend 10-15 keywords per ad group.
Fig. 3
You?ll notice that I created separate ad groups for words that pretty much mean the same thing. A good example would be ?tennis professional? and ?tennis pro.? The reason I do this is because I want my ad copies to reflect the search query. This will give searchers the confidence that the service they?re seeking can be found within your website. At the same time, ad copies with text that match the search query verbatim will tell Google that your campaign is very relevant, which will produce a higher quality score and a lower CPC.
For Campaign 2: City by City, the setup process is comically laborious. You?re going to do what you did for Campaign 1: Generic Search (Los Angeles), but add each major city within the LA Metropolitan. For this example, I only did it for the city of Cerritos. To ensure you don?t miss any traffic, repeat the steps for every single city within the LA Metropolitan.
Fig. 4
*There are some of you who may be wondering why I don?t suggest using keyword insertions. For those who don?t know, keyword insertions is an advanced AdWords feature that dynamically updates your ad copy to include a keyword a searcher used. A perfect example would be to refer to Ad Group 1 in figure. 4. I could use the term ?tennis instructor? and place a piece of code into the ad copy to have ?Cerritos? triggered when used in conjunction with ?tennis instructor.?
I don?t like doing this because I want complete control and a complete forecast of every single one of my campaigns. This is why I?d rather spend hours making 100 ad groups than giving up something to the unknown. Besides, let?s say we used the keyword insertion feature ({Keyword: Cerritos, Santa Monica, Los Angeles} Tennis Instructors) and somebody typed in ?Santa Monica Tennis Professional.? A generic default text would be triggered because ?Santa Monica Tennis Instructor? is 5 characters over the limit. Situations like this make me very wary of using keyword insertions.
Step?5?? Continue To Fine-Tune Your Campaign
Constantly monitor what works and what doesn?t. If you find a keyword that isn?t performing, pause it. Write several ad copies and see which one performs better. If you find that searchers are clicking through but that it doesn?t result in more sales, consider re-doing your landing page. And always make sure you capitalize on seasonality and emerging trends.
What about Google AdWords Express?
It isn?t easy for local business owners to pick up AdWords and use it with familiarity, which is why Google created something called AdWords Express. Google claims they created AdWords Express to be ?an easy advertising solution for local businesses while AdWords is a fully-customizable advertising solution for any business.? In other words, you can never customize AdWords Express in a way that is uniquely optimized for your business.
I had the good fortune of coming across a recent blog post by Search Engine Journal entitled ?Is AdWords Express Hurting Your Small Business???Please refer to their post for a small case study of how a small business owner lost a fortune using AdWords Express.
About the Author:?Delbert is an?internet marketing consultant?specializing in pay-per-click and display advertisements and is passionate about helping small businesses understand and develop intelligent internet marketing campaigns. You can connect with him on Twitter?@delbert_kim.
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