PPC for Local Business: 3 Important Pieces of Your Strategy

When local businesses set out to build and manage their own PPC advertising, they often see results they’re not happy with. There’s a host of specific reasons as to why, but one of the obvious reasons is related to the competitive nature of PPC in the local space. You do not need to pay whatever it costs to rank in the first ad spot.

Google will push you to:

• setup automated bid strategies such as, maximize conversions.
• turn off manual CPC bidding.
• turn on enhanced CPC bidding if you have manual CPC bidding on.
• run the maximize clicks bid strategy without a bid limit.

Each of these bullet points take control away from you and put more in the hands of Google.

This causes you (the business owner, duh) to overspend on clicks and in turn, overspend on leads.

This is exactly the reason why we’ll hear local businesses say, “PPC is just not for us.” Truth of the matter is, it actually is for you, you just need some tweaks and fine tuning to your campaigns.

Account structure

We can’t stress enough how important the structure of your account is. Your campaigns and ad groups must be broken down in a way that best suits their goals.

Some things to keep in mind while building out a campaign:

• Daily budget is broken down by campaign
  • You can share budgets across multiple campaigns
• Location targeting is broken down by campaign
• Keywords should be grouped into themes within campaigns (and ad groups)
  • If you have a big budget you may want to create campaigns that are very granular. For example, you’re a personal injury attorney, you may want to put all medical malpractice keywords in one campaign, separate from a campaign that targets breast cancer misdiagnosis. Both of these topics are two areas you cover, but you separate them into different campaigns because they are to be treated differently. The keywords, ad copy, bidding, bid strategy, budget, location targeting, layered in audiences, ad extensions, ad schedule and more may be wildly different for each.
  • You do not want one keyword cannibalizing the entire budget (aka spending your entire daily budget so that the other keywords miss out on the action).
• Ad scheduling is on the campaign level
• Bid strategies are on the campaign level
• Etc. There is plenty more information in regards to account structure that is important for you to understand if you plan to build and manage your own PPC advertising.

Your website

Before going into the level of detail required to manage a well-performing PPC advertising campaign, you should confirm that your website is responsive and is built with your conversion goals in mind.

Is your landing page intended to drive form conversions or phone calls?

This is something you should ask yourself before ever spending money on running traffic to the page. Imagine yourself as a potential customer, are you confused by the appearance of your site? We can’t stress enough how important it is that you are properly guiding the potential customer in your conversion funnel.

Each dollar you spend on PPC advertising is extremely important to your business. Don’t waste it!

Ad extensions

Are you using all relevant ad extensions?

Ad extensions are sort of like “bonus space/info” that Google gives you.

You can setup:

• sitelink extensions
• callout extensions
• structured snippet extensions
• call extensions
• location extensions
• message extensions
• price extensions
• and many more.

Each of these extensions will give you more space in the search results to get your message across. They will also help boost your quality score.

If you’re interested in having your PPC advertising campaign audited, then please don’t hesitate to reach out. Find out how you can take your business to new heights with well-built and managed PPC campaigns.

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Nick Vitucci

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