Local Pay-Per-Click Advertising With Google Adwords
Pay Per Click is a great way to advertise in your local area. It puts your company, and advertising message on the top of the search engines immediately. No waiting like with organic advertising.
Customers searching for your products and services will have instant access to your company message right at the top of the search engine results pages, or next to relevant content in the local online newspaper.
Geo-Targeting Example
If you only want your ads to be seen by people who are searching from within a 2 mile radius from the North End of Boston, your campaign can be structured this way. You determine what neighborhoods have access to your message, and which don’t.
There are Two Ways to Set Up a “Local” PPC Campaign
- Determine a geographical area at the campaign level, so people outside your target zone will never see your ads, so they can’t waste your money.
- Run a national campaign but only use keywords with local modifiers. EXAMPLE: If you are a dentist in Boston Massachusetts add keywords near your practice; boston dentist, dentist boston, dentist boston ma, dentist in boston, dentist near boston etc…(You do not need to capitalize keywords)
When you begin to add all the towns around your area, you may end up with a keyword list of 500-1000 words and phrases. Setting up an account and optimizing it with hundreds or thousands of long tail keywords, spread across many campaigns, with many ads, in multiple ad groups is more work than most PPC management companies ever do.
Search Engine Optimization For Local Businesses
Optimizing Webpages for Local Search
Optimizing a web page for local search, means being careful to include geographical identifiers in your web page content. If your a boston dentist, make sure you have these keywords in your content. Also include synonyms for your keywords and rearrange them.
Local Optimization Tips
- Be sure to use keywords naturally in your content, do not stuff keywords onto a page. But, do make sure they are also in your; Title, H-tags, and URL if possible.
- Include your physical location on every page of your companies website.
- Link to Your Google Maps page.
Local Town Directories
Most cities across the United States have a local town directory, or some sort of county directory. I would not pay for placement in these resources, but when you can get a link to your website, and some free local publicity and traffic, why not?
Press Releases
Issuing a Well Written Timely Press Release Is A Great Way to Promote New Local Services
Alerting the local media when your company is offering a promotion, or is helping a local charity, is a great way to promote your business in the community and build a little brand awareness.
Adding geographical keywords to your press release will help it to get picked up by local news companies, and properly indexed in the search engines. Always be sure add your address, and cover; who, what, why, and when.
Press releases have a chance to go viral, meaning, if your story is good enough it will be seen by many, who pass it along to many more, the story grows exponentially. When its all done and said you may have a great local reputation, Brand awareness, and tons of links all over the web that routinely direct traffic to your humble little website. Free-Press-Release.com is a great site, I recommend going for the 1 dollar upgrade so you can ad a link.
The Best Free Lunch On The Internet For Local Search
Click Image For Larger View
Be sure to claim your free business listing at Google Places, most businesses on the top of the search engines are listed in their free directory. The United States most heavily trafficked search engine is Google, they own like 80% of all search traffic. Did I mention it is free?
Other Major Directories
Bing Local and Yahoo Local are also worth mentioning as well as Local.com, Yelp, Merchant Circle and Whofish. All these directories are free at this time. Of course they all offer upgraded services, but I have tried them and did not find them worth the expense.
These are the places your neighbors are searching for local products and services, you have probably been on one of these sites your-self in the past.
Video Tagged With Local Modifiers & Keywords
A simple little video hosted on your own YouTube channel is an extremely powerful way to promote your location, services and or products. Be sure to have keywords + town and state in the title, description as well as the tags section. Most new cell phones can capture the video, and the YouTube account is of course free to set-up.
So there you have it, many ways to advertise in your local town and surrounding area. For more tips and advice follow me on twitter @Inform_Local.
Written by Michael Kern
