"widget repair" in "city name"

Targetting adwords to a particular city, for small local businesses

[brycen]

I offer "widget repair" in my own town, and a few neighboring communities.

I can't compete with the national "widget repair" companies, who are already heavily polluting the AdWords space. But if someone searches for:

_____"Widget repair in Shantytown,IA USA"_____

I'd really like to get it. If a user has bothered to enter a specific city, I assume they'd like to deal with a local firm.

How do I set up AdWords? This is my first guess. Can I do better?:

"Shantytown IA" "widget repair" ** 0.1
"Shantytown IA" "widget repairing" ** 0.1
"Shantytown Iowa" "widget repair" ** 0.1
"Shantytown Iowa" "widget repairing" ** 0.1
"Hankyville IA" "widget repair" ** 0.15
"Hankyville Iowa" "widget repair" ** 0.15
-"cheap"
-"free"

[johannes]

How many Shantytown or Hanksville are there in USA? You could try to leave out IA or Iowa from those keywords. There will of course be more impressions, but if you specify Iowa in youre ad text, the conversion could be good anyway.

I'd remove that -cheap. If a customer specify cheap I haven't seen a bad conversion.

Try the adwords keyword suggestion tool also.

[brycen]

If my customer enters:

____"Widget repair in Shantytown"____

My adwords ought to be more "relevant" than a national chain simply keying on "widget repair". Is there anything I do to get better positioning for these location-targeted searches?

[brycen]

How do I avoid tedious long lists of potential variations in the keywords?:

"widget repair" "Newton,MA" ** 0.25 
"widget repairing" "Newton,MA" ** 0.25 
"widget repair" "Newton MA" ** 0.25 
"widget repairing" "Newton MA" ** 0.25 
"widget repair" Newton Massachusetts ** 0.25 
"widget repairing" Newton Massachusetts ** 0.25 
"widget repair" Newton ** 0.15 
"widget repairing" Newton ** 0.15 
"red widget repair" Newton MA ** 0.30 
"red widget repair" Newton Massachusetts ** 0.30 
"blue widget repair" Newton MA ** 0.30 
"blue widget repair" Newton Massachusetts ** 0.30 
"widget repair" Allston ** 0.10 
"widget repair" Brookline ** 0.10 
"widget repair" Boston ** 0.10 
"widget repair" Brighton ** 0.10 
-"cheap" 
-"free" 

I'm competing with servicemagic here, which has placed dozens of sham pages on the web (e.g. complete-contractors.com , 123home-care.com, service-select.com
and home-contracting.com/Massachusetts/Appliance_Repair ) just to drive traffic to servicemagic. They also use adwords. They also get top spots in google free search.

[vibgyor79]

A few suggestions for you brycen -

- Remove phrase matching. You would want your ad to be seen whenever somebody types in 'repair widget' or 'affordable repair of widget' too right?

- Remove the state name.

- Think of synonyms for both your 'widget' and 'repair'. Repairing is a good example - yes. But there are others like repairs, face lift, patch up, fix etc.

[brycen]

My idea was I'd accept a search of "widget repair Brookline", but if I was sure they meant "widget repair Brookline Massachusetts" I'd pay an extra ten cents. Did I do it right?

[brycen]

With adwords:
"widget repair" "Newton MA"

And a google search for:
widget repair Newton MA

I see my ad. But if I add a single word, my ad is not
shown:
widget repair in Newton MA

What's going on? It looks like google is treating this as a single phrase, not two phrases.