Local Internet Advertising Guide

What’s the future for Adwords and local businesses?

I have seen the cost per click of adwords go up over 300% for some local business keywords in the last year, and i’m sure there will be examples of other larger increases in some cases.

Google have created a fantastic money making machine for themselves, but over time I’m certain that the front page sponsored results will become simply too expensive for smaller businesses.

As an example, searching for plumbers in (location) results in a variety of results, some are directory sites, some are independent businesses, some are larger operators.

There is only so much space on the right of the page, so taking or plumber example, there are 5 - 10 national businesses that operate plumbers in various areas, some as franchises or otherwise.  It stands to reason, that over time the bigger national plumbing companies will simply outbid the local operators… another channel for the small business bites the dust, or we will see.

My model with locallycompared.com is to provide unlimited enquiries, and randomised ordering of results for one fixed yearly price. This means that our paying businesses cannot reserve a top position, but will allways be at the top for a percentage of the time, ‘fair’ being the operative word.

How do we solve this? over to you Google…

Google Adwords are a great way to get people to your businesses website, but it can be expensive!

You can spend as much or as little as you like on Adwords, so its about maximising the return on your investment.  Once you’ve been to Google and signed up for an adwords account, you’ll need to add some credit to get started.

You can then set your budget for the month, and start telling Google which searches you would like to appear in on the far right hand side of the search results. Competition, as with normal Google positions in the centre if the page, is intense. Google bases how much you pay per click on how intense the competition is for the keywords your bidding on.  This means that a click could cost as much as £20 if you’re a ‘hotel in london’, or just 1p if your a ‘dog walker in canterbury’.

So it’s time to be creative with your bids! You can do this by thinking about how you can exploit the ‘long tail’ of searches (more on this later). This is simply bidding on keywords or phrases that less people search for, but are still relevant to your business. For example, there will be a lot of competition for searches for ‘plumbers in london’, but much less competition for ‘plumbers in brixton’. This way you can reduce your Cost Per Click and still get visitors to your site.

Adwords is a great way to get new customers, and I’ll be posting more on this soon.

Thanks,

Steve