Reaching Local Customers by Targeted PPC
It’s relatively easy to target your pay per click, or PPC, advertising campaign to your area, so you’ll be able to get customers for your business. While there are lots of options available, one of the best systems for geotargeting PPC campaigns is Google AdWords.
If you want your ads only to be seen by people in your area, geographical targeting comes in to the picture as a valuable tool. Use Google AdWords to focus on a specific city. That way, only people searching Google in that city or area that you specified will see your ads. Keywords don’t matter here, if the person searching the internet isn’t in the city you have targeted, your ad won’t come up.
Why would you want to keep your ads from being seen by people outside the correct area? If you only do business locally, clicks from outside the area cost you money without bringing in a return. Confining your ads to the pool of possible customers means that each click has a much higher chance of turning into a sale.
There is a lot more to geotargeting than just isolating cities. What about someone who doesn’t live in your area, but plans to travel there on a holiday? This is a potential sale missed if you don’t take it into consideration. If your business relies on income from tourism, it would be an advertising disaster.
The way to deal with this problem is to use a locally targeted keyword list. This will help you include your ad in searches done by people who aren’t in town now, but want to know about the local situation where you are. You can modify the same types of keywords that would normally be used as part of a global PPC campaign to suit your local marketing plan. Just ad the area to the keyword phrase. That means that “car rental” becomes “car rental in St. Louis” or any other area you’d like to target.
Using a targeted keyword campaign like this one also means that you can use the other systems out there (Google AdWords isn’t the only one), though Google really are the big name of the market. Good PPC systems can use geotargeted keywords to ensure you’re only directing your advertising dollars in the area that will make you sales. Many advertisers use both techniques together with great effectiveness and reap the rewards of concentrating on specific markets and regions.
There are a few things to pay attention to when you start to market like this. There’s no use promoting your goods to areas you can’t deliver them to, so stick to your original plan and don’t try to get too clever with it. Choose your keywords (and the areas you promote them in) wisely and satisfaction is almost guaranteed.
When you do choose your targeted keywords, it’s important that your words or phrases receive a large number of results. That way you won’t completely isolate yourself, which is easily done if you try to get too specific. Check and track the statistics of your ads and see what keywords or phrases work best for you. Targeting a local area with a PPC campaign could spark the surge in sales your small business needs.
