Local Marketing Using Google Adwords

In my last article, I went over some basic information about what pay-per-click advertising is and what it can do for you. In this article I will start to go into some specifics on how to increase your you traffic with quality people that are in your target audience.

Effective keywords are the secret to effective pay-per-click advertising. At the risk of a really bad pun, good keywords are the key to your success. A good keyword tool can help you make correct decisions about what keywords to choose. If you are reading this article, then like me you are looking for a free solution to this. One such program is Good Keywords. This piece of software will allow you to, among other things, enter a keyword or key phrase(a series of keywords) and the software will find out how many times they have been searched in the last month, and what other keywords are being searched for in the same category.

In other publications about using Google Adwords you can find out how to get to the tops of some lists by targeting a lesser used keyword. I am going to show you how to get to the top of the list and target only those people you are interested in. This will save you a lot of money, and will increase your CTR(Click Through Rate) and conversion rate drastically if implemented correctly.

Lets say your company makes custom office furniture in Pittsburgh, PA. You use your Good Keywords tool and find that the key phrase office furniture was searched around 179,157 time last month through Overture. You can multiply this number by about 8 for Google. You find that the key phrase custom office furniture was only searched around 712 times. By targeting your specific geographic region you can take advantage the key phrase office funiture without the fear of pumping a lot of money into competing with thousands of companies.

By going back to Good Keywords and entering the key phrase office furniture Pittsburgh we can find out that it was searched 88 times last month. That seems like a small number having looked at the 179,157 there was for office furniture, but these 88 are alot less competitive a market and they are your specific audience.

In the next article I will show you how to take the key phrase we selected and start a Google Adwords campaign to target it. Later in this series we will also focus on how to target geographic specific publications. We will also be going over the specifics of the Adwords interface and how to use it to manage your campaigns.