Advertising on Google Local

Online business loves free advertising especially on Goggle, but not all of them are listed on one of the most important online business directory – Google Local. Google local advertising offers the option to target ads to searchers in a specific geographic region. Because of this method Google uses to identify the location of these searchers, though it is necessary for local advertisers to run national ads as well. Local business ads are a great way to have an extremely targeted regional campaign. You can create a business listing so users can easily find your business when they do a local businesses search on Google maps. The advantage of these listings is it is free to display. Google local ads also offers paid business ads for advertisers to display their ad in the Sponsored section.

For national campaign you need to include regional-specific keywords while for the regional campaign you need to include more generic keywords. There are two reasons why you need the national campaign:

1. Google’s local targeting is achieved by correlating IP addresses of a computer to geographic locations. Users that are connected via large ISPs will be routed through proxy servers and the location of those proxy servers will be the only location Google can determine. This location is sometimes not anywhere near the real searcher’s location.

2. Many people search at work or in different places. If these searchers have a long commute, their geographic location will not match the location from a Google regional campaign, however, these searchers might be searching for products or services that are near to their home and not their workplace.

Keep in mind that a real local ad campaign on Google would include exact phrase or phrase and negative matches as well as broad matches. A Google local ads campaign is comprised of ad groups which include at least one ad and a list of keywords. The keyword list for each ad group should be organized with a theme which closely matches the text of the ads. For example, if you are targeting Los Angeles, you cannot create a business ad for Houston. Also, only keyword-targeted campaigns can include local business ads.

The local ad will be most effective if, upon clicking the local ad, the searcher land directly to a page which the searcher wants to see. If the local ad is linked to the home page and the searcher has to search again on the web site to find the information he is looking for, the ad will not be quite as effective.

Google AdWords is an ideal and effective, yet complicated, platform for the local advertising of products or services.

All the local search advertising undertaken with Google needs to be organized into at least two campaigns, one with local geotargeting and one with national geotargeting.

The campaign with local geotargeting should include your general keyword phrases while every keyword phrase in the nationally geotargeted campaign should include your location keywords.

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Google local advertising offers the option to target ads to searchers in a specific geographic region.