The Best Search Engine ROI – Local Advertising

I just read The Best Way To Save Money On Advertising – Target Locally. It tells you what many search engine marketing experts (and even amateurs) have known for a while–if you want a better ROI, get local.

If you’ve ever used Google AdWords, you learned this lesson quickly, especially if you didn’t have a large budget to start with.

For my web design firm, our most valuable keyword phrase is “utah web design”. What do I mean by “most valuable”? It’s a combination of total revenue and return on investment. There may be keywords we have that are producing a higher ROI, but only producing $1,000 per month in revenue. “utah web design” gives us a high ROI, to be sure, but it also generates larger total amounts of revenue. And for you accountants, yes, it’s also the most profitable kind of revenue we get, at least thus far.

But wouldn’t you get more business if you were advertising under the keywords “web design” instead of “utah web design”? Yes, of course I would. I haven’t done pay-per-click (PPC) advertising for just the terms “web design” because my ROI would go down. Here’s how it works:

Somebody in Utah needs a new website for their company. They go to Google and do a search for “web design“. Then they click on a few listings. They quickly realize these companies are all over the US, and what they would really like is to work with a local company. So now they do a search for “utah web design“.

If I had an ad listed nationally, I would have to pay more to be near the top than I have to pay to be near the top in Utah. If the person searching is in New York and they find out I’m in Utah, sure, they might contact me, but chances are they wouldn’t. I’m going to have to spend $20 to get someone to contact me off of my national advertising, whereas I’ll only have to spend $2 if I target my advertising towards Utah.

But maybe this is obvious. What if you do have a national market and your customers aren’t concerned about location? You can still save money by targeting locally. Target everywhere locally. That might sound like a contradiction in terms, but here’s what I mean.

You can buy advertising that is generic and where the terms are broad. This kind of advertising has higher demand, so the prices are higher (basic economics). Advertising in Utah does not generate as much demand, so prices are lower. So if you’re doing a national campaigns, buy your keywords in every state or major geographic location. If my firm were spreading out that would mean we would buy “web design” along with every state and major metro included in the keyword phrase, so “phoenix web design”, “california web design”, and “chicago web design” would all be in there.

Not only would this save us money and generate a higher ROI directly, but indirectly we would get better leads, because when someone clicks on a search result they found while searching for “chicago web design” they are already assuming that company is located in Chicago, has an office in Chicago, or at the very least already does business in Chicago. The question of “But can they help me if I’m in Chicago?” already gets skipped.