Guide to Driving Search Traffic Locally on a Dime

My Local PPC Tips:
1. Research your keywords. (i.e. “city” pizza, pizza in “city’, carry out in “zip code of city”… and so many other variations.

2. Ad Copy. Make sure when you create your various ad copy, to include, the city, zip code, special discounts for nearby universities, police, firefighters, include what makes you special.

3. Geo Targeting. Unless you can deliver your pizza across the city and surrounding suburbs then you’re unlike many local restaurants with limitations. Let’s say you can only deliver within a 5 miles radius. In this case, when setting your PPC campaign, restrict your (delivery) ad copy to reflect your limitations. With your other ads that are being used for brand awareness and dine in you can set the limitations a bit more loosely.

4. Cost. If you only have 10 bucks a day to spend you better hope to convert. Now, I’m very concerned about conversion, as they drive business growth, No conversions = no money = not happy.

Make sure you understand your margins, including the costs of using your credit card machine when taking phone orders. From experience, you will spend more in the beginning of any PPC campaign, while you’re collecting enough data from the campaign to make smart and actionable optimization changes.

5. Content Sites vs. Search. If you have a limited budget, you need to produce highly targeted traffic that is in their transactional stage. I would say content sites would drive more brand awareness then a searchers who’s looking to order pizza.

Once you’re converting well and you’re happy with the performance, you'll have a benchmark to measure against running content sites when the time comes.

Running a successful PPC campaign relays on your landing page, that relate to each keyword and ad copy. In the coming days, I'll create a post on layout tips when designing and coding local market landing pages.

Cheers!

Benjamin Burns Search Engine Marketing