Transcription
Local businesses have such a huge advantage when it comes to getting customers from Google app campaigns, but so many of them don't even know what this advantage is, let alone how to use it properly. In this video, I'm going to show you my favorite technique for massively improving the results that you get from your Google ad campaigns for local businesses specifically.
So, like I said, local businesses have some significant advantages when it comes to running Google ads. Firstly, you're only competing against other local businesses. You aren't in a situation where you're running Google campaigns trying to get clicks and then eventually conversions from people that are also being advertised to by businesses all across the country, maybe even internationally, that are offering the same thing or a very similar thing to what you're offering. You're only competing against those businesses that are running ads on Google that are operating in that local area, and that is an enormous difference; that is not something that should be underestimated.
Now, the disadvantage to that is that there's less search volume. Because if you can only serve customers in your local area, it means that you can't advertise to the whole country internationally, where there are a lot more search impressions. However, with local businesses, obviously, if you get it to work really well in one area, you can expand to other locations, and then the same dynamics apply, right? In each one of those new locations, you're only having to overcome the local competition, which is much, much easier than trying all in one go to overcome national or international competition. I've seen it happen many, many times. So the competition is that much lower, that much less; that's a really good thing.
And the second thing is that, as a local business, you naturally get more trust from your potential customers as opposed to a business that is on the other side of the country, in another country. People naturally trust that the company that's in their local town, that's just down the road, that there's some social stakes there—that this company has to do a good job, otherwise, they only operate in this area; the word will get out; no one will work with them. So there's more sort of, uh, responsibility, more pressure for them to make sure that they deliver a good product or a good service, whereas some nameless, faceless company on the other side of the country or the other side of the world, in a different country—like, why do they care? They can just work with someone else; no one will ever find out, etc., etc. And I think, with good reason, there is more trust put into local businesses.
One of the ways you can see this, by the way, if you've got the data, you've been running Google ads for a while, is take a look at your search terms report and have a look at the searches that have your location in the search, and then take a look at the conversion rates. Now, you'll have to have quite a few searches and quite a few conversions to be able to sort of run this analysis and have it produce meaningful data for you, but if you do that and you have enough data, you will almost certainly see that those people that are searching for whatever, you know, your business or service or product or whatever it is, plus the location in which you operate, those convert at a higher percentage than the equivalent searches without the location. A big part of that is that trust element that I've been talking about.
Now, one of the mistakes that local businesses make is they don't take advantage of this enough; they don't emphasize the fact that they are local prominently enough. And I think that one of the really easy switches the businesses can make to get better results from the Google ad campaigns that are advertising to a specific location is to make that as clear as possible.
Now, I'm going to get into the specifics of how you do that in a second. Before I do that, I just want to quickly let you know about our done-for-you Google ad services. So my company can create, manage, optimize Google campaigns for you. We can take the workload off your hand, so you don't have to worry about it; you can focus on other areas of your business that I'm sure need a lot of attention and will almost certainly get you better results than if you manage it yourself, anyway, because we do this all day, every day; have done for thousands of clients; spent tens of millions on the platform. If that sounds interesting, there is a link in the video description. You can click on that, come through to a page on our website, book in a free, no-obligation call with one of my team members to find out more about how we might be able to help. So if that sounds interesting, go ahead and do that, and hopefully, we get a chance to work together.
So how do you properly emphasize that you are a local business in your Google ads? Now, I'm actually not talking here about local search ads—Google's LSAs. I'm going to create a whole separate video about those, because it's a different thing. Really, what I'm talking about here is a quick and easy change that you can make within your existing Google search campaigns to really emphasize the fact that you are a local business, and that can really supercharge your results. I'll talk more about that in a second, once I've run you through this technique.
What I'd recommend you do is that you create really tight location-based ad groups. So what a lot of local businesses will do when they're creating their Google ad campaigns, their Google search campaigns, is they will maybe have just a one ad group with just all the keywords lumped in there—some location-based, some not—or they might break it out and say have one ad group for people just generally searching for our product or service, and then another ad group that's more focused around the town in which we operate. I would like you to go one step further and get really specific. So let me give you an example to demonstrate this and walk you through it. Okay.
So let's say, for example, we're advertising a domestic cleaning service—businesses, cleaners, cleaning services and residential properties. So you're obviously wanting to put your ads in front of people searching for cleaners in the area—residential cleaners, domestic cleaners—that sort of, that sort of stuff, right? Now, instead of just having either the one ad group where you've got, like I said, some location-based keywords in there, some not, or separating the two out, having one location-based, one not, for the whole of an area, a whole town, a whole county, whatever happens to be the area in which you operate, break it down and make it more specific. So I'll give an example location—a town in the UK I grew up near called Reading.
Now, you could, like a lot of people do, create an ad group with domestic cleaners Reading, Reading domestic cleaners, Reading residential cleaners, cleaners in Reading—you know, these sorts of keywords, right? And then you're targeting searches that are going to include the word Reading in, and you can obviously look to set that up using various match types; it's not the sort of purpose of this video here. But Reading is a pretty big town; there's probably a couple hundred thousand people, something like that, that live there. So you're likely to get much better results by, instead of just targeting people searching for Reading broadly—you want to do that, but you also want to have other ad groups, people targeting the specific regions of Reading. So you could have an ad group for Caversham, for example, which is like an area in North Reading. So instead of just having domestic cleaners in Reading as a keyword that you're targeting and looking for searches that are closely related to that, you could have domestic cleaners in Caversham. Now, if someone is in Caversham and they search for that, and then they see an ad that has that prominently displayed—domestic cleaners in Caversham—the word Caversham—that is much more likely to get their click, and that is much more likely to get the conversion than the equivalent that just has Reading or one that isn't location-based at all. Because people go, "Aha, that's literally exactly where I am; that is perfect for me; that is exactly what I was looking for; they probably also clean properties down the street from me, in my neighbors; maybe I can ask someone about them." This is, this is exactly what I'm looking for. And you're benefiting from those things I started the video with—the natural advantages that local businesses have. The more specific you get in your local area, the less competition you have, and also there's that natural trust between you and your potential customers, hopefully obviously once you start working with you with your actual customers.
So you tap into those advantages, and you tap into those preconceived notions of: if they're just down the road, they're more likely to be trustworthy, and I'm therefore more likely to work with them. By making it very, very clear in the ad that you are actually local, I think a lot of advertisers, they think, "Well, it's obvious; obviously we're a local business; we've operated here forever." Your prospects don't know that, and they're taking a very quick glance at search results on a page on Google; they're not giving it any thought or attention. I've had discussions; people say, "Well, it's in my domain name, so people are going to work out…" Like, you need to make it more obvious than that.
So here's how I'd recommend you go ahead and do that—make it, make it super, super obvious. I'm just going to jump over to an example Google ad account, and here we are at the ad level with a responsive search ad. And what I wanted to just quickly demonstrate with that example is you want to make it really prominent, but you want to absolutely make sure that it is always really prominent that you are not only local but very local. So, for example, what you could go with is something like this. So let's say one of our headlines—and important in the headline is—domestic cleaners in Caversham, like I mentioned, a region within Reading. So you put that as one of your headlines. Now, if you write a bunch of other headline options, as I would usually recommend, Google's going to test all sorts of various options and then see which works best. You can override that, and I think for a lot of local businesses that makes a lot of sense. So, for example, we can click on this pin button, and we can say, "Look, show in any unpinned position." So basically, make sure that this headline is one of the headlines always, or you can get even more aggressive with this, as it were, and show only in position one. So if I go ahead and select that, that means that domestic cleaners Caversham, that is always going to be the first of the headlines that are shown, so it is super, super clear to your audience that you are local for anyone that's searching for anything sort of domestic cleaning related, including the words Caversham as part of this ad group. And obviously, you'd have another one, like I said, more broadly for Reading, and another one for the different other regions of Reading, and then other ones that don't—other ad groups, as it were—that don't include locations at all specifically. And you could also even do the opposite; this works. I want to demonstrate both ways because this works for some businesses, not others; sometimes just the syntax doesn't make sense if you change around the wordings. But you could also go with this: Caversham domestic cleaners, and have the name of the place right at the beginning to make it as obvious as you possibly can. And again, you could unpin the other one and say, "Look, I want to pin this position one," etc., etc., right? Um, and makes it around, but I want to show both versions because obviously, like I said, some businesses can do it both ways, some can't. But make sure that you've got that location in there, make sure it's headlines, make sure it's pinned so it's always visible, and you're almost certainly going to get significantly better results. I've seen it happen many, many times.
Now, you can get extra brownie points by making sure that this is all matched up with your landing pages as well. So you've got the really specific search based on the specific location matching with obviously keywords that are targeting that search that then demonstrate that in your ad, and it's pinned as a headline. People go, "Aha, this is perfect just for me," and when they click through, ideally, they would come to a landing page that makes it very, very clear that you are very local. And you could have different landing pages for those different location-based ad groups that we discussed. So we could have one for Caversham; we could have one that's Reading specific; we could have one that's for other regions within Reading as a town, assuming obviously you operate in those areas. So that when people come through to the landing page, they go, "Yes, perfect; this is exactly what I was looking for; these people are very local," much more likely to inquire and uh, and convert and do all the things that we want people to do from our Google ad campaigns—become leads, become customers, pay us money, etc.
And before you go, I've got some other Google Ads tips that I think you'll find really useful. You can give them a quick watch right here in this video. I go through some Google Ads tips—my favorite Google Ads tips for significantly reducing your cost per click, which can obviously have a massive impact on your Google app results. Go ahead and give it a watch.