Google Ads for a Local Business: How to get started on the right foot?

There are advertising channels that can completely change the strategic structure of your ADV calendar. One of these is the path made available by YouTube Ads. But is it worth it? Here’s what you need to know.

When we talk about local businesses, we always tend to imagine these activities as small in scope, often managed by an equally small team, with many dreams and little Insurance budget.

Nothing could be more wrong because the caliber of a local business certainly does not depend on the range of action.

When we talk about local advertising, advertising (abbreviated ADV) means advertising; it is a paid message that a company sends to inform or influence the people who receive it. We are faced with companies with no way of – or do not want at all – to follow customers outside well-defined geographical boundaries.

We are talking about realities that range from the small takeaway pizzeria to the large law firm. They offer their customers from technical assistance to professional training, passing through all those brands. A Brand is an identification symbol, trademark, logo, name, word, and phrase that companies use to distinguish their product from others. A combination … – even bigger ones – already with a robust online presence that they decide it’s wise to start collecting lead.

In short, different scenarios in which – almost textbook – it is essential to juggle Google Ads by choosing what to use and what not to use in such a vast platform.

Today I Will tell you about the first steps–

1. Aim high
2. Master the excluded keywords
3. Extensions: the big 4
4. Call monitoring (on-site)
5. Call announcements
6. Adjustment of the offer
7. The location options
8. Geographical boundaries

1. Aim high

When we talk about local marketing, we need to get into the proper perspective.

While Google Ads is an excellent tool for driving traffic to our site, we always care that this traffic is kept as high as possible.

Aim for the moon; if it goes wrong, you will hit a star. Advertising means looking on the net, first of all, searching for long-tailed terms (more complex, focused searches, which include a handful of times) compared to dry, more generic, introductory keywords with little commercial value.

Try to focus on the best possible scenario, buying matches with searches that have the highest economic value and that already include geographical meanings. To take a step back, going back up query. A query is usually used to indicate a request that a user makes using a search engine. Whenever we look for something on an engine more generic, if a sufficient research volume does not materialize, there will always be time.

Google’s keyword planning tool (which allows a geographical restriction on projections) or other similar devices such as KeywordTool.io (which also includes informative queries in their results) are handy to outline the starting scenario.

2. Master the excluded keywords

At this point, it becomes essential to master the exclusion of terms from our campaigns. But, unfortunately, That’s is a mistake that I still see many advertisers make, especially beginners.

It’s not just what you buy in terms of matches but what representations you exclude (preventing them from showing your ads) to get, from the intersection of these two sets, only great value searches.

Is it, therefore, more efficient to use tough matches, employ only phrase or exact matches, or leave broader matches free, perhaps in modified generic form, and act on exclusions on the other side? It depends.

I find that a fair balance can arise from initially using generic modified in any case with a geographical meaning, excluding only the most blatantly misleading terms.

3. Extensions: the big 4

For a local business, needless to say, the first and most important extension to keep under control is that of location.

That involves, it is good to remember, first of all, to claim and keep updated your MyBusiness card. That’s, on its own, will show in Google Maps (and not only) our local business, including reviews, phone number, opening hours, driving directions, and much more.

Once this is done, it will be a matter of a simple click in Google Ads to adopt part of this information as an extension of our ads on the search network, showing the address and telephone number when the ad will be delivered in the same area. The action is indicated in Google MyBusiness.

In Google Ads, segmenting the tables by “Click type” will give you an insight into the yield of any clicks on the location extension.

Don’t neglect call extensions. The result is counted in phone calls received rather than in leads or purchases generated on the site for many brands out there. For example, if I have to order a pizza at home, I call. I don’t fill out a contact form.

A call extension is activated by simply indicating the phone number and choosing whether or not to have Google monitor the received call.

This aspect is fundamental because it will track every call received from the ads as genuine conversion. The visit of …, receiving from the reports, the calling user’s prefix, the number of seconds of conversation, and any missed calls. Not bad!

Remember, of course, to schedule the delivery of this extension only during the business’s opening hours so that there can always be someone on the other side to answer.

Callout extensions are also invaluable for rotating targeted messages along with ads only on specific days and times.

Local businesses can offer, for example, daily promotions with different frequencies and different commercial levers that can be useful during the week.

Finally, the Sitelink extensions. Suppose your site is already quite effective in managing the traffic received. In that case, you may want to direct users and click the ad on your landing and other alternative destinations.

Design 4-6 Sitelink Extensions to tell the user “alternative entry points” to your site.

Are you a fish restaurant? Undoubtedly point to a landing page (much better) or to the homepage (if you really can’t do otherwise) but also make sure to provide several Sitelinks to the “Contacts,” “Menu,” “Products,” “Where we are” or “Book online.”

4. Call monitoring (on-site)

We said, for a local business, telephone calls often represent a large part of the result.

Remember that in Google Ads, it is possible to define conversions of the telephone call type that occur, unlike the monitoring of call extensions, directly on the website.

However, it is a (minor) technical matter that requires you to get your hands on the code: you will need a good developer.

Consider this: however motivated you may be, you’ll still have several users who will click on your ads and browse your site, ignoring any other stimuli. Then, maybe they will close the browser.

Monitoring the phone calls that, from mobile, will be triggered by a click on the phone number on the site will allow you not to miss even a precious conversion.

5. Call announcements

Call announcements are an opportunity not to be underestimated for a local business.

The idea is simple: to provide users who search in Google (from a mobile device) with an ad that includes a few lines of text, the name of the business, and the inspiration for a direct telephone call.

All without visiting a landing page or showing other cues when clicking on a website.

A call announcement consists of several parts:

• Two titles (30 characters maximum, highly recommended)
• Your business name (25 characters maximum)
• The Phone call number you want the user to call
• Two more lines of text as a description (90 characters maximum)
• The display path (2 fields of 15 characters top, optional)
• A URL
• A verification URL that reports a webpage that has your business phone number.

Of course, Google may decide to show all or part of these elements depending on the ad’s context.

Many businesses that don’t have an effective presence rely heavily on immediate contact; they’re an even quicker shortcut than call or location extensions.

6. Adjustment of the offer

Adjusting the bid allows us to change the maximum CPC bid as a percentage (positive or negative) when the user sees our ads in specific contexts.

Don’t forget first to modulate the offer between desktop, mobile, and tablet-based based not only on the results you get but also on common sense.

If your product is takeaway pizza, perhaps (perhaps) it will not prioritize delivering your campaigns on desktop or tablet, but it will make sense to focus mainly on mobile.

Furthermore, even good daily and hourly programming can push offers into the best days and times to bring quality traffic.

Suppose the example is always the takeaway pizza. In that case, it makes sense to restrict the campaign hours from early afternoon to early evening, avoiding dispersion in the rest of the day (in which, usually, ordering a pizza at home is not the priority). And modulate, on this partition, the Maximum CPC bid towards the even better days and times among those designated.

7. The location options

A lot can be done about the location options as well.

First, the interface in Google Ads allows us to freely indicate countries, cities, regions, and even postal codes. So far, nothing new.

If this were not enough (and often not enough), it is possible to indicate a radius on a specific city, thus avoiding necessarily including the entire metropolitan city, something that can take the extension of our campaigns far beyond what is necessary.

Furthermore, remember that it is possible, on the map, to activate the option “show all areas” to see a puzzle of locations to be chosen much more quickly and clearly.

Again, by choosing to operate by “radius” rather than by “location,” the map allows – a bit like Facebook for some time – to click anywhere on the map and indicate the radius in kilometers or miles. Thus, even a shift of about ten kilometers on campaign targeting can make a difference, allowing us to include or exclude more or less densely populated areas.

Also, remember to change the advanced location targeting options accordingly when you indicate a location target. The Target is consequently also if you do not act. Otherwise, the platform will reach all users who are within it or who show interest in it.

That’s means that if you add a location like “Turin” and don’t check these advanced options, you could reach a user well outside the city, who nevertheless appears to be very interested in it.

It may seem influential, but let’s go back to the takeaway pizza example. If you cannot, or it is not acceptable, to reach a user from outside the city,

Much better than acting on these advanced options to reach only the people who are usually in the target locations.

8. Geographical boundaries

Doing local advertising is the best test for those who want to understand how much and how they have understood the most intimate logic of an advertising platform.

Because when the boundaries tighten and the potential interlocutors drop, it is necessary to understand how the machine works.