Google Ads for Local Service Business WITH A small BUDGET

Even with Local campaigns changing to Performance Max Campaigns. Google Search Ads for Local Service Business are the Best option.

August 2022 is the month that your local campaigns will automatically be changing over to Performance Max campaigns. 

Right now for local businesses my very strong recommendation is that for local advertising you should be focussing on one campaign type ONLY and that is Search Campaigns. 

The reason for this is search campaigns give you a lot more control over your:

•  location targeting
•  Keyword targeting
•  Ad copy
•  And audience targeting

Plus search campaigns will give you so much more data that you can use to ensure that you are able to see the best results with the lowest ad spend possible

In fact I have always found that local businesses get a far better results with search & display rather than using local campaigns.

So in this video I am going to show you what you need to focus on if you want success with Google Ads as a local business owner. 

For success with Google Ads as a local business owner you need to remember that with Google Ads there are 4 main targeting options that you have which are:

1. Locations
2. Keywords
3. Audiences
4. Time

Then on top of this we want to find what are the best messages & call to actions which lead to more conversions.

• The most important element for your local marketing is that you want to limit the area where your ads are showing!

The reason for this is that initially you want to focus your ads on people in your local area. Once you have some strong data you can then expand your campaign to also target people who are living outside your target area but looking for services in your area.

So in the campaign settings you want to go to Location and then choose Prescence only

This setting then means that your ads will only show for people who are currently in or regularly in your area.

Another great option is to also add your location targeting by a certain radius from your business. 

• To optimise the keywords that are triggering your ads in Google you want to be completing Search term audits every 72 hours or twice a week

If you don’t know how to complete a search term audit all you need to do is to go to “Keywords > then click on search terms” this will then bring up a full list of all of the keywords that have triggered your ads. 

For search campaign's that are targeting local business what you want look for is for searches are not  relevant and add extra negative keywords to stop your ads being triggered for these searches. Here are the main themes that you want to look to filter out:

•  have the service that you are providing but not in your location 

This has happened because someone who is in your targeted area is looking for your service outside of your area

• competitors names. If you want to set up a seperate campaign targeting competitors you can do this later down the track but reason for why I exclude these competitors names is because they usually have a higher Cpc and lower conversion rate as you are trying to convert someone who has already searched for a competitors name

•  the last thing you want to check for is search terms that are for people who are trying to learn how to complete your service or looking to buy a business and this is where you will see terms like: DIY, Buy & free

• The 3rd area of targeting for success with Google Ads as a local business owner is to add in your Audiences 

For audience targeting the goal here is to collect as much data a possible so that you can then add in some extra bid adjustments at a later date when you have enough dat

A common mistake I see here is that people will just add in 1 or 2 audiences 

What you need to remember is that by adding audiences in Google as an observation is that you are not limiting your ads to ONLY people in these audiences BUT that you are asking Google to give you the data on these audiences groups

So want to adding audiences until you get 80% or your clicks and impressions coming from added audiences. 

•  Show search function & Detailed demographics 

• The 4th way to better target & lower the costs of your Google Ads campaigns for your local business is to limit your ads to days and times of the week that you want to receive enquiries

This is especially important if you are wanting to focus on phone call enquiries. As what is the point of getting people to call your when you know you won’t be free to answer your phone

Here is how you can limit the hours & days that you ads appear in Google.