Advertise Locally Using Search Engines

While search engine advertising has been a great advertising medium for businesses capable of or interested in advertising their services and products to a national or global audience, the effectiveness of the sort of advertising was limited for businesses interested in advertising to a local market until very recently.

By way of example, a realtor with a web site in Minneapolis is likely interested in advertising on search phrases such as"homes for sale" and"sell my dwelling." The only problem was that the realtor would need to market to everyone in the nation who happened to type those terms into search engines. This was wasteful and inefficient because the huge majority of visitors clicking through to the website wouldn't be qualified visitors because they dwelt out the realtor's regional industry.

At that moment, the only work around for this was to incorporate a regional qualifying term beside each search term, so rather than advertising on the word"houses for sale" the realtor would need to advertise on"Minneapolis homes for sale"

What about the potential clients who reside in Minneapolis, but just type in"houses for sale?" They are probably just as qualified for the realtor, but it there was not a means to target this sort of searcher. The difference between forcing advertisers to utilize regional qualifying terms or advertisements to a national market was eventually closed this spring by Google.

Local Targeting

Targeting a known geographic location of searchers became a reality earlier this spring when Google launched their neighborhood targeting program. So now the realtor in Minneapolis can market on the more general provisions, then specifying a geographical area they would like the ads to look inside.

The choices for this include choosing specific cities, metropolitan areas, or just a distance radius from a particular point. By way of instance, perhaps the realtor just wants to generate leads from within 30 miles of the dwelling.

Does this work?

Yesit works really well. There are hardly any kinds of advertising offline or online in which you have such detailed control over which you're advertising to. Basically it's pretty difficult to beat advertising to individuals that are looking for what you sell and happen to live near your business. And, as this is pay per click advertising, you're only billed when searchers click through to a web site.

Local Advertising Tips

Boost Your Location - You will definitely see better conversion rates for your regional advertising if you include your physical address in your web site. We recommend including this in the footer of each page of your website in order to reinforce that you are local to the prospects.

Track Performance - When you use local advertising you will still have to compete against companies prepared to advertise nationally on precisely the exact same search phrases. This implies search phrases can get pricey but your conversion rates must encourage this. However, as with any kind of advertising, it is important to track what is working.