There are many strategies that businesses can use to improve their marketing but one of the most successful is often targeting local customers. These are the people that live close by and are looking for your products or services. By focusing on local customers you can not only increase your enquiries but also attract more referral traffic and ultimately work – what’s not to like?
So let’s dive in and take a look at the top 5 tips that will help your Google Ads campaign perform better locally.
Radius targeting
Our first tip is all about location, location, location and in particular radius targeting. This is a way to geo-target your campaigns to a specific radius around a point or location. So for example, if you know that people are willing to travel 30 minutes to visit your store then you might want to set your radius to 15 miles around your business address. This means that anyone outside this location won’t see your adverts.
Target long tail keywords
Yes, it’s true that 2 – 3 keyword phrases have a lot more search volume but by using long tailed keywords you’ll have a much higher conversion rate. For local businesses, this is key in helping you weed out people who are just browsing and instead focus your budget towards visitors who actually want to visit your business. Adding your location to your keywords also ensures that potential customers who are close to you will see your advert when they’re searching.
Call extensions
Want to help customers to connect with your business? Then adding a call extension to your adverts is the way to go about it. Not only can a call extension give customers the option of calling your business directly from the search results but you’ll also be able to track phone calls as conversions if you’re using a Google forwarding number. This means you can optimise the performance of your campaign and see which of your adverts is generating calls!
Negative keywords
Nope, we don’t mean bidding on keywords that are bad. Negative keywords offer a way to restrict when your adverts show up, so for example, if you have a keyword “plumbers in Manchester” then a negative keyword you might want to include would be courses. By including irrelevant words you can help to make your campaigns more targeted resulting in a better conversion rate and more enquiries for your budget.
In-store conversions
Make sure that you measure the performance of website metrics that lead to in-store visitors. This can be a get directions button on your website, a click to call button or viewing the opening hours of your store. These are all things that can be measured with Google Analytics and imported into Google Ads to help you improve your local performance.
We hope that these tips have helped you understand the importance of PPC to boost local performance.