10 Search Engine Marketing (PPC) Strategies for Local Businesses

In my last post, I told you all why I think more businesses need to focus on the local, and move into the global.  As a follow-up to that, I want to talk about one of the primary ways local businesses can use the web to promote themselves: search engine marketing (SEM).

SEM/PPC (pay-per-click) has become synonymous with Google’s PPC product, Google Adwords. Adwords accounts for over 90% of Google’s annual revenue.  The majority of that revenue, however, has been generated by larger, national or multinational advertisers.  Google has had a harder time penetrating the local market.  There are a number of reasons for this, but one of the bigger ones is that creating a SEM ad campaign for a local business requires different techniques and different strategies than creating a campaign for a national advertiser.

With this in mind, let’s take a look at 10strategies for improving the SEM campaign for your local business.

1. Don’t stop at Google

Google owns a little over 80% of the search market in the US, and 90% in Canada.  With such a vast majority of the market covered, there is a big desire to simply forget about the other search engines.

That’s silly, especially for local businesses.  Google’s primary advantage from a paid search perspective is its massive distribution network, and the huge amount of traffic available.  Local advertisers don’t benefit very much from the distribution network (see #6 below), and they typically have smaller budgets, as such, they can’t touch most of Google’s traffic anyway.

Most local businesses could easily spend their entire budget on Yahoo or Bing paid search. There have even been various studies that have been conducted that suggest that both of these engines convert better than Google. While I’m skeptical of that fact, one thing I do strongly believe is that, whether your potential customer is coming from Google, Yahoo, Bing or Dogpile.com, he is still arriving at your site through a relevant ad, based on a search he performed. Why should you care where he came from?  Would you turn away business from a newspaper ad because you really just wanted to focus on your television spot?

I also haven’t mentioned the primary reason to use search engines other than Google: the clicks are cheaper.  Because all paid search engines run on a bidding system, the more competition there is for keywords, the higher the cost of a click.  Yahoo, MSN, and even smaller, second-tier search engines, can provide you with traffic for a fraction of the cost of Google.

This being said, while most of the strategies that follow can be used on any platform, they will be written from the Google perspective for the sake of simplicity.

2. Target locally, target nationally

No matter how many times Google tells me they’re doing all kinds of cool things to determine the geographic location of a computer, I can’t quite bring myself to believe them, and here’s why: I live in Montreal, and I consistently see ads for Toronto, a city that’s 600 km (400 miles) away.  The reason for that is that the primary way that search engines determine a user’s geographic location remains through his IP address.  A user’s IP address is determined by where his internet service provider’s hub is located.

While this works well in most cases, there is still a large number of cases (such as mine), where geographic targeting of a campaign is inaccurate.  As such, the only way to ensure that your campaign remains truly local is to build two campaigns.

The two campaigns will essentially be identical, but the targeting on one campaign will be local, and the targeting on the other will be national.  Obviously, you don’t want traffic from all over the country, so in the national campaign, you will only use keywords that are modified with local modifiers.  So, while in your local campaign you might have the keyword “plumber,” your national campaign will include local variations of this word, such as “plumber nyc” or, “plumber manhattan.”

3. Include a local phone number in your ad texts

Users who search for local businesses are often bombarded by irrelevant, non-local results.  One of the easiest ways for you to make an impression on a user is by showing him a local phone number.  He knows his local area code, so he knows you’re a local business.  I’ve run a number of large scale tests on this, and it works almost without fail.  Don’t expect to save a ton because of people who will just call instead of clicking, though.  Remember that user behaviour on search engines is often driven by a click-happy, information-hungry, user-base that want more than 70 characters of description before they call you.

Also, be aware that toll free numbers don’t work as well for this kind of thing for the same reason that local numbers do: they don’t scream local.

4. Modify keywords with landmarks as well as cities

When modifying your keywords for geography, don’t stick to the city level.  While many users will search with a city name, others will search using the name of a region, a neighborhood or a landmark.  So, in addition to “plumber nyc,” try things such as, “plumber in soho,” or, “plumber near central park.”

5. Use Google Local extensions

Under the campaign settings tab in Adwords, Google allows you to add a local extension to your ads.  To use this feature, simply add your business’ address in the local extension form.  Your ad is now eligible to serve in Google Local results, as well as show the address in regular search results where it is relevant based on the user’s search query.

6. Avoid the content network

Google’s distribution network, known as its Content Network, works well for large national advertisers, because they don’t really care where their potential customers are, but for local customers, using the Content network efficiently is very difficult.  Unless you can choose individual placements on sites that you know are locally relevant, you’ll likely be wasting your time and money on the Content Network.

7. Target mobile

By default, Google allows you to serve ads for people on all platforms.  I used to recommend removing the option for “mobile” because the odds of getting a conversion from someone browsing on a regular mobile phone were slim to none.  Now that smart phones have become the norm, that logic has flipped on its head.  Phones have the most accurate geographic recognition from a search engine’s perspective, larger screens, and click-to-call power that make mobile phone users the ideal targets for a search marketing campaign.

8. Take advantage of negative keywords

Because local advertisers tend to have smaller budgets, it’s important to keep the focus of a SEM campaign tight.  Some of the ways this can be done is through the use of carefully selected keywords set to exact match.  The other way to do this is to liberally use negative keywords in both broad and exact match.  In order to determine good negative keywords, use Google’s keyword tool, and run regular search query reports withing the Adwords report section. Add nonsensical keywords as negatives.  Look for irrelevant queries in your reports, and add those as negative keywords.  Also, be sure to include nearby locations that you don’t do business in as negative keywords.  This will prevent someone close, but not close enough, from mistakenly clicking your ad and costing you money.

9. Use day-parting

Most local businesses have operating hours.  If your business has opening hours, and you can spend your SEM budget while serving ads only during those hours, do so.  While you can get good leads from customers who find your business after hours, and return to your site, or take your contact info down, visits that occur during business hours, are that much more immediate, and are that much more likely to lead to an immediate action by the user.  That added proximity and immediacy makes leads during business hours, more valuable than those after hours.

10. Optimize your landing page for local

You can have the greatest campaign in the world, but if your landing page is not optimized, it’s useless.  Be sure to optimize your landing pages specifically for local traffic.  This means including elements that speak to the location of the business, such as maps, driving directions, nearby points of interest, etc.  Users looking for local businesses, are likely looking for a more “traditional” experience (ie. talking to a person), so make sure your contact information is prominently displayed and easy to access.

Explore More

The above were just ten of my favourite SEM strategies that are particularly useful for local, but there are many more.

What are some of your favourite local web advertising strategies?  Have you tried SEM for a local business?  What were the results?  Let’s chat in the comments.