guide to local pay-per-click advertising

For local search, the usual PPC tips on ensuring that the landing page is the page that will be designed to encourage a sale (not just take people to your homepage as a matter of course), etc., need to be supplemented. A few suggestions include:

• Be sure to include as much local information (phone numbers and city name, etc.) as allowed in your local PPC ad, not just your URL
• Become more familiar with the types of products/services that are best suited for local purchasing to ensure local search will really improve your ROI and not just add expense to your budget. Some types of products are more often purchased locally than others – for example, professional services such as doctors, lawyers, etc. usually do well with local search options, while products/services that consumers are used to purchasing online (such as CDs, movies, etc.) may not increase your ROI much by using local search.
• Investigate the pay-per-call options that some PPC search engines are now offering, especially if you do not have a website. Wireless search is next on the horizon too as another type of way to integrate local search into paid ads if you do not have a website.
• As with all purchases, do some research before you decide which PPC local search engine to go with. Try some searches on your own for products you would like to buy locally and see how well the results fit your search. This can help you judge before you even sign up to try out a new service.
• Ask your PPC representative for assistance on how to make your ad more appealing to a local market.
• Remember that a search engine that only uses IP addresses as a means of tracking local users will not be as accurate as one that use a geographic method to target them (usually assistance via a yellow pages connection, mapping sites, or databases of information on individuals taken from various sources). Be sure you know which method of tracking is being used to deliver local results.
• Figure out what is unique about your product/service compared to the same business 5 blocks away from you in order to include this information in your local ad to gain further advantage (examples might include “open 24/7”, a comment on cheapest prices or if you offer a delivery service).

Above all, remember that once you have a local PPC ad, you are concentrating on competing against other businesses just like yours in the same local area (how wide depends on your search engines options and your ad budget), so make your local ad as unique as possible and as compelling as possible to offer something to set it apart from your LOCAL competitors now as well.

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(Internet Yellow Pages, City Guides and Comparison Shopping Search Engines)