From The Yellow Pages to The Google Pages.

How people find local businesses is changing.  No longer does everybody head straight to the yellow pages to find the local products and services they need.  More and more are heading straight to Google. 

In addition to searching on Google.com, there is also the rapidly evolving http://www.Maps.Google.com  

You can now see a visual of any building on a street level view.  Every detail about businesses is given in one place, including reviews, hours of operation, website links, hours of operation, and more.

At the same time, Google shows AdWords ads as your browse:

Imagine if you owned a local restaurant.  What would it be worth to you to get your ad in front of hungry customers looking for a place to eat?

This feature is just a small taste of what AdWords has to offer.  It's a one stop shop to do all of your local advertising from getting ads on local blogs to offline newspapers, local radio stations, mobile phones, and even television.

Simply put, if you target a local community, AdWords can be a mainstay source of new low-cost business.

Best of all, many local advertisers are afraid of using pay-per-click search engines.  Using it right can seem complicated.  If they do use it, they often only dabble in it.  They don't get the power of it.  

This means you as an advertiser can take over.  There are a wide-number of techniques you can implement to dominate the local results.

Here are just a few tips for targeting local areas:

• Look for local blogs or review sites to target with your ads on the content network,
• Pay close to the areas you're targeting.  You want your ads to only show-up for those likely to become a customer.
• Don't use your business name as a title. Come-up with unique headlines for each of your keywords.  For instance, a common search likely is for "Pizza restaurants."  If you bid on this term, be sure it's clear that this is what you offer and why you're the place to go to.  
• Look-up zip codes to include in your keywords.  For instance, if a user types in "23412 Restaurants," you can bid on this term. 
• Encourage customers to post reviews of your business on your free Google listing.        

You should also keep in mind that you don't have to have a local business to target a local area.  For example, if you're a florist and you ship anywhere, you can target local areas competitors ignore.

All in all, it's important to realize that how you're customers find you is changing.  Offline advertising will always be important, but you shouldn't make the mistake of underestimating what local AdWords advertising can do for you.

Test, tweak, experiment and track results to tap into this growing source of new business.

Comments

[Tim]

Great advice. Thanks, I'm targeting local businesses.

One thing. Watch out for the Traffic Estimator Tool. Particularly customised locations. I had thought this would be great for local businesses. It ain't.

I was doing some research for a client in a small town. I drew a 5 mile circle from the town centre and the tool said I would get 1254 - 1580 clicks a day.

My excitement quickly evaporated as I realised that this would require the total population to search on this obscure keyword twice a day. Unlikely.

I then tested using country selection. That's New Zealand. Find Hawaii and go 3/4 of the way to the Antartic.

Total country clicks a day: 3 - 4. Funny. Google is telling me that 2% of the national population who live in my target town click 400 more times than 100% of the population of the country. Unlikely and logically impossible.

I then did my circle test right in the middle of the Pacific and Google told me the fish and sea birds would click 1254 - 1580 times a day. Exactly the same as my small town.

I raised this with Google and after many emails they finally registered and said they would look at it. No reply many weeks later.

I also did the same test in the middle of downtown Chicago and in the middle of the big lake next to it. Same result.

Also the estimated ave CPC is similarly questionable. Play around with max CPC and you can vary the cost of a 1-3 position by 500%.

Exactly the same as happens in Keyword Tool.

[Ed]

Great tips on how to tweks your ad campaign's with google adwords.

Thanks for the tips, looking forward to your newsletters...

Ed