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By Helen, May 21, 2010 10:06 am

A common issue faced by our clients is that they need to find an effective way of targeting potential clients online who are situated in a particular local area. 

If this sounds like you, here’s a checklist of several effective ways to target your local customers online:

• Make sure you have created a listing on Google Maps. If you’re listed already (as many businesses are) then take control of your listing by creating a new entry on Google Places that exactly matches the listing you see for your business on Google Maps (even if the details are wrong). If you’re not listed already then it’s very straight forward to create a new listing.
• Don’t be lazy with your Maps listing. By including lots of keyword-rich text, adding pictures & video, adding your business to relevant categories and making sure you get some reviews from friendly customers, you can improve your position in the listings.
• Don’t forget that you can target Google AdWords campaigns to a specific geographical area – so that when anyone within a defined radius of your chosen location searches for your chosen phrases, your ad is displayed.
• And of course, you can target your local area through organic search too. Make sure you mention your geographical location plenty of times on your website, and work it into your title tags in particular. You can even target surrounding areas with some careful thought – for example, mention that your business serves x, y and z areas in addition to your own.
• Facebook pay per click advertising allows you to advertise only to specific geographical areas, and indeed to particular demographic groups.
• Twitter is also, of course, an excellent place to find your local customers online and build relationships with them.

Need to target a local audience online? Contact Helen for more details about how Ascendancy can help.

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By Helen, March 25, 2010 8:33 am

Increasingly, we take over Google AdWords accounts that our clients have set up for themselves and subsequently found the system more difficult to make pay than they had expected.

Google AdWords makes me think of the phrase ‘A minute to learn, a lifetime to master’ which was on the box of the Othello board game which I used to play as a child. Google have done an excellent job of making the AdWords setup process easy to use, so that clients can get an account set up (and start giving Google money!) in less than five minutes. The trouble is that many of them are not quite sure what to do next.

I asked our AdWords whizz James about the mistakes he sees time and again in the self-managed accounts that we take over:

• Keywords which are too general – advertising on a single word such as ‘hotel’ or, even more bizarrely, an adjective such as ‘quality’ – it’s highly unlikely that someone who’s searching for the word ‘quality’ on its own is going to buy your quality handmade jigsaws. Be realistic about the phrases that are likely to bring buyers to your website.
• Only one Ad Group – A lot of inexperienced AdWords users will select a number of keywords on a range of topics and put them all in one Ad Group. Keywords should be arranged into groups according to logical themes – different Ad Groups for different products, for example.
• Ads pointing to the home page – Instead of to a relevant landing page
• No negative keywords used – Negative keywords stop your ads showing for irrelevant phrases, saving you money and improving your clickthrough rate
• No awareness of the Quality Score – We could write a whole separate article about Quality Score. In a nutshell, good Quality Scores enable you to buy clicks at the best possible price. If you use AdWords and don’t know about the Quality Score, you should!
  Ads that don’t include the target keywords – By including your target keywords in your ads you could raise your clickthrough rate and your Quality Score (see above!)

If you’re looking to improve the return on investment from your AdWords account, we can help – contact us for more details.