Advice for a local service company trying adwords

[gniland]

I have recently started helping a small local shop with their adwords. I've quickly realized it is harder to manage a small local campaign than it is to produce high conversion results for a national campaign. The shop is a service provider and thus they only care about people within 2 hours of them. So I can't use the keyword "widgets" because that is displayed for everyone and I either lose money or have very low ctr. I have tried adding geographic terms to the keywords like "shangri-la widgets" but those terms deliver too little impressions.

Any advice?

Sorry, if this was already posted. I searched for previous postings but I couldn't find anything.

[rossH]

not being facetious, but if shangri-la delivers too few impressions, doesn't that mean not many people in shangri-la are searching Google for your client's local services?

i.e. this may be the wrong venue, and the wrong flight.

I use G for local searches when I know the name of a company, for example, and want its phone number, or a map, or I think I can drill to a movie schedule quickly. But does your target demographic know it can do that with your client? If it does, where's it looking, and for what?

does the target go to the local newspaper online? the clasifieds? Maybe your dollar is spent better in the gradual saturation of the local venues, finding people already looking local, and hitting them there with your message?

[MarkWolk]

gniland, first, if the region in question is a country, then no problem - you can select the country where your Adwords are displayed.

If it is only a part of country (i.e. US state), there is no way to automate this and the only way is to include the local towns and cities in the bidded terms.

If that does not bring much traffic, it will bring a very high CTR. Do not hesitate to place high bids on your Adwords for these very specific listings.

If I was looking for a car repair shop in Shangri-La, I would definitely not expect to find it under "car repairs", but I would add "Shangri-La" to my search string. If your adword was there, I would click on it 100%.

[enuff]

I'm facing a similar situation. By law, we can't ship outside of the boundaries of our province, but anyone can order and have deliveries made here. So if you live elsewhere but want gifts delivered in this province you can order but if you want to have them delivered in your province you can't.

Trying to figure out how to make Adwords work in this instance. Tried qualifying the traffic in the copy of my content, but I'm not making the minimum click throughs.

Any other suggestions?

[martinibuster]

doesn't that mean not many people in shangri-la are searching Google for your client's local services?

That's a logical conclusion, but from my hands-on experience managing similar campaigns, it's not true. The reason for this is because the average surfer (which you, we, us are not) uses very general search terms. Johnny can't surf [webmasterworld.com].

A month ago I heard Overture state that the average search term was 2.5 words in length. That means around 2-3 words in length.

If I was looking for a car repair shop in Shangri-La, I would definitely not expect to find it under "car repairs"

Same thing as above. Based on my hands-on experience handling local adword campaigns you would be astounded to see how general those keywords really are. Searchers rarely use "my city widget repair," and even in those cases they don't necessarily click on your ad.

Solution? It's tough.

1. "qualifying the traffic in the copy of my content" is the first step.
   
2. Discover the negative keywords that your search may turn up for by using Google's tool.
   
3. Discover the negatives by studying Google's "natural" results as well as the copy of your adword competitors.
   
4. Do extreme copy to keyword matching, and divide these into many groups then keep your eye on which ads are underperforming. Give it a couple weeks to a month to see the patterns arise. Then weed out the underperforming sets.
   

There's more to be done, but that's my secret sauce. :) Y

It's a lot of work and very tough to sustain a local campaign. This is one of the shortcomings of adwords, but if you do a lot of work on it, it's possible to sustain and make a good roi. But I see a lot of people fail.

[webdiversity]

I'd advise them to think outside the box.

Why not get them to find companies in a similar business that might be 4 hours away, 10 hours away, different continent? They can then pass on the enquiries in exchange for commission.

Local services, tough one to crack, but most of the points we use have been covered, but to re-iterate the ad copy is vital.

[gniland]

Solution? It's tough.

Thanks Martinibuster for stating the obvious :) and also for providing a good concise list of tips.

I am targeting business within a US state. I've created a ton of seperate ad groups to deal with the targeted copy and tracking. More work than I ever thought it would be.

[oLeon]

I saw a statistic by Onestat on the SES in London mentioning that 1-word, 2-word and 3-word searches are almost the same figures, round about 26 to 28 % of all.
I can remember very well, that in former search statistics the 1-word-search was up to 50 %. So the searches become more and more aware what they do or want.

But - a few days ago I heard from a friend that the normal configuration on a new pc with windows XP doens't show the adressbar on the IE. so how should a new user know how he could go to another websites without using MSN-search, the default search on the startpage?

[gopi]

I think for local/regional businesses Organic SEO is the way to go as it will normally be not that tough to crack

[martinibuster]

I think for local/regional businesses Organic SEO is the way to go

You're right, they are easy to crack but unfortunately there's no traffic. In my experience, the reason for this is that searchers are using more general terms.

[Ankheg]

It never amazes me the things people will type to find my sites. :) For adwords keywords, I'd try things like:

"widget shangri-la"
"widget shangri la"
"widgets shangri-la"
"widgets shangri la"
"widgets sl" (the official abbreviation for shangri-la?)
"widget sl"
"widget cityname"
"widgets cityname"
"widget county name"
"widgets county name"
"widgets badlands" (or whatever else your area is called)
"widget badlands"
"widget bad lands"
"widgets bad lands"

There are a lot of terms that people use which don't immediately come to mind; heartland, twin cities, tri-state area, tri-county area, quad cities, et al ad nauseum. Try out as many as you can think of with the minimum bid and see what happens.

[gniland]

"widgets cityname", "widget county name"

I agree with your first suggestions, However I think there would still be problems with your last suggestion

heartland, twin cities, tri-state area, tri-county area, quad cities

My heartland is different than your heartland and tri-county area is any area where three counties are close to each other.