Highly-Profitable Pay Per Click Advertising for Local Businesses
Creating a Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing campaign aimed at your local audience couldn’t be easier: you open an account with Google, Yahoo or MSN (these are the most important search engines, draft your ads, set your marketing budget and geographic parameters…and voilà! You’re up and running.
Now that your ad is running, what do you do next? You have to manage your campaign to maximize your return on investment (ROI). After all, you’re advertising to make a profit, and that begins with optimizing your advertising dollars. The difference between a “normal” PPC campaign and a “successful” one can often be measured in hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in cost savings and additional profits.
So what’s the secret to highly-successful PPC marketing? It starts with identifying the right keywords for your local market, and goes on with constant monitoring of each and every keyword’s performance and adjusting each bid along the way.
Choosing the correct keywords for your target market can seem a challenge if you don’t have the right approach. Your portfolio of keywords needs to be relevant enough to drive traffic to your site, while eliminating those prospects not likely to become paying customers. The name of the game is attracting local prospects that are specifically looking for what you have to offer.
There are numerous tools available to assist you in identifying the perfect keywords for your local audience. Many are expensive and difficult to use. And as a busy business owner whose based in, say, Ottawa, you may opt to work with an Ottawa PPC management agency to research those keywords for you. However, if you want to avoid paid tools or services altogether, there are excellent free keyword tools you can use. For Google Adwords, I highly recommend there Keyword Selection Tool: it helps you not only choose relevant keywords, but numerous synonyms that can literally help you dominate your local niche.
Some small business owners don’t realize that PPC marketing is basically a huge auction: the highest and most relevant bidder (we’ll talk about relevance below) is the one who’ll win the auction…every time. In PPC marketing, the highest bidder’s ad will occupy the prime space on the search results page…which will result in more traffic than lower bidders’ ads.
But high bids is only part of the story. Your ads need to be relevant. Search engines (especially Google) will reward your ads with higher positions – and even lower bids – if they are highly relevant to what their searchers are looking for. Therefore it is important that you group your keywords in themes based on your target market. Again, you can decide to leverage the experience of a local PPC management firm to help you define those audience profiles and write highly-relevant ads…and potentially lower your advertising costs in the process.
As soon as your local advertising campaign is running, it is critical that you monitor your ads’ performance: how much are they costing you as compared to your resulting sales? There are advanced bid optimizing strategies that can skyrocket your ROI (you can either search Google or contact a qualified PPC management firm for more information), but at a minimum, you should eliminate those keywords that are not performing to expectation.
Successful local PPC marketing is possible with the right keywords, highly-relevant ads and continuous bid optimization. It may sound like a lot of work, but the financial rewards are well worth it.
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