Why Local Businesses Should Give Adwords A Go

November 29, 2018 by Andrew Riedel

Digital marketing and Google AdWords go hand in hand. When a user is looking for something, they are likely going to search it on Google or other search engines. AdWords and organic SEO is what gets you found.

For small businesses, Google AdWords can be immensely effective at driving traffic, promoting your product, and significantly increasing your sales and revenue. In this article, we’ll explain why local businesses should give Google AdWords a go.

1. Google AdWords Helps You Reach Potential Customers

(No Matter Your Size and Rankings)

Almost all businesses would like to be found on the first page of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). When customers can see you at the same time they’re looking for your information, location, products, services, or deal, this becomes “intent marketing”,  a highly effective kind of marketing that targets someone who intends to find your products.

For small businesses, getting on the first page of the SERPs can be really tough, considering that you’re competing with big brands, who can hire career-long, motivated, and experienced SEO experts. Nonetheless, Google AdWords helps you compete on the same level, regardless of how long your business has been around and your own SEO expertise. It lets you be seen by your market at exactly the time they are looking up a specific product or service.

2. Adwords Lets You Reach Local Customers More Reliably

With Google AdWords location targeting options, you can geo-target your message to be seen by your local customers. So, whether you’re are a local neighbourhood restaurant, an ecommerce store, or a regional company, you don’t have to waste your marketing budget on people who are outside your target area.

Google AdWords allows you to target countries, regions within a country, a specific radius, etc. in order to display your message to user within a given radius of your business. If you want to, you can omit some locations too, along with the proximity targeting. Excluding location helps to bring your ROI up by have more precise targeting and lowering your costs.

You can also target certain demographics with AdWords, such as income level and age. As such, if you’re a business selling luxury designer apparel, you can target the top 10% income earners in the areas you deem fit.

3. Follow Your Customers With Adwords Retargeting

This is something you’ve probably noticed before. You go to a site, browse it for a while, and leave. But when you go to different site, you start seeing the ads of that company and their products. That’s retargeting. (Facebook have their own version of retargeting)

When a customer visits your site, Google AdWords tags them with a cookie, from a code you’ve put at the backend of your site. So when they leave, your ads will follow them on Google Search and on the Google Display Networks.

Although you’ll have to pay extra for this, it’s really effective in increasing your sales.

Why?

Well, these people were already interested enough to visit your site, and when they see you time and again, you remain on their mind. This is especially true for the “shopping around” customers who, when they see your brand name, logo, and offers more frequently than your competitors, they’ll most likely come to you when it’s time to make a purchase.

4. Include Your Address & Contact Information In Google Ads

Ad extensions allow small businesses to boost their AdWords campaigns with addresses, phone numbers, landing page links, app downloads, previous page visits, reviews, and more. They typically show up in blue, and are shown just below the ad description.

When you include more contact information in the ads you put up, the ad extensions will make it easier for the potential customers to connect with you. Plus, they won’t cost you anything to include as you’ll be charged the same for a click on them. For example, if a user clicks on your phone number and calls you directly from the ad extension, you’ll be billed for the paid conversion.

As a rule of thumb, if you want to localise your campaigns, ensure that you localise a corresponding landing page. You don’t want to drive traffic interested in brick-and-mortar results in the area to a generic website that is not optimised to receive them.

With Google Places, you can enhance your AdWords by showing a map of your brick-and-mortar shop within your ads. This helps make it easier for customers to find you, and come at your door.

5. AdWords Provides Measurable Results

Google AdWords comes with lots of customisable options for monitoring and measuring your campaigns conveniently in one dashboard.

For instance, you can set and monitor you own goals for:

• The organic traffic to your site

• The return on investment (ROI)

• Total sales and conversions

• Brand awareness

You can also see the performance of metrics such as:

• Keywords that generate the most traffic

• The times at which your ads perform best

• Headlines that get the best click through rates

Moreover, you can connect your site to Google Analytics to see what pages the ad traffic is visiting within your website.

Google AdWords is one of the key ways for small businesses to reach potential customers, drive traffic, and ultimately increase their sales. However, it doesn’t have to be implemented alone.

Organic SEO and Google AdWords is such a Powerful Combination

The main benefit of AdWords over organic SEO is that it generates results faster. However, it can get quite expensive in the long run. As such, while it’s a good idea to use Google AdWords for the fast results, it has to be used in conjunction with a proper organic SEO strategy for sustainable success.

Keep in mind that even with good rankings, you might still want to use AdWords for more exposure for the different keywords that get you more SEO traffic. If your AdWords campaigns are profitable, you can increase your budget to generate higher ROI.

With that in mind, consider using Google AdWords to start generating traffic, and work on your organic SEO, social media, and content marketing in parallel for sustainable long term success. Organic SEO and AdWords aren’t rivals; they are in fact two powerful tools that you should have in your digital marketing strategy.

When you have Adwords and Organic SEO working effectively together,  you can get at least 3 results on the first page of Google

1. An ad in one of the four ad slots
2. A listing in the Map Pack/Local Maps/Snack Pack (or whatever name you know it by)
3. A listing in the traditional organic section under the local maps

Many of our clients have achieved the trifecta for multiple keywords. Are you next?

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