People tend to think of organic search as the more viable option compared to Google Adwords for attracting new customers. A lot of times it does tend to be the better fit. Do not discount Adwords, however.

If you don’t see any results immediately with Adwords, people tend to become frustrated because you are still paying for the clicks. There are settings on Adwords that are designed to help you attract local business. If you take advantage of them correctly, Adwords can help you improve your local visibility, and by extension, grow your local business.

According to Google, 97 percent of users search for local businesses online. That is an astonishingly high number. Google Adwords can help you position yourself highly in these local search results for highly competitive keyword phrases.

This is how it works. Say hypothetically that you run an Italian restaurant. More than one and a half million people used the search phrase “Italian restaurant” in Google’s search in a month. That is a really difficult thing for a small independent restaurant—near impossible—to rank highly for. If you Google it, mostly major chains come up for results. So how do you compete with that to break on to that first page?

This is where Google’s pay-per-click comes into play. What you could do is run a Google Adwords campaign for the same keywords. Since it is a restaurant, you are looking for mainly local customers. If you did this organically, there would be no geographic base. You would have to include geography in the search terms.

Adwords has a setting for a local search. What you can do is enter zip codes for the local areas. Now, what you have done is to increase your chances of ranking highly for these competitive search terms locally.

So if somebody in your town is hungry for Italian food, they find you up there on the page with all the big chains. This is a great way that Google offers to help level the playing field for small businesses.

 

Are you looking for more help to take your business to the next level? Idea Marketing Group is a Chicago design company that specializes in custom web design services and digital marketing packages to help businesses grow and meet their goals!