Working through your local SEO checklist takes time, and even then the results usually aren’t instant. In the meantime, you’ll still want a way to rank at the top of the map results, because who wouldn’t? If that’s the case, you can use Google’s Local Search Ads to advertise your client’s business on Google Maps with Promoted Pins.

What are Google Maps ads?

Google Maps ads, also known as Local Search Ads, are a type of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising that allows you to promote your client’s Google Business Listing at the top of the map search results. 

What are the benefits of Google Maps ads?

• Drive more foot traffic to your store. With local search ads, you can make sure you are showing up for people looking for your products and services near your location.
• Get phone calls and leads. Maps ads also include the option for users to call your client’s business by displaying the phone number of the featured business location.
• Showcase your business at the top of the results. Help customers learn more about your business by showcasing your Google Business Profile, which includes information such as reviews, photos, store address and hours of operation. 

How do Google Maps ads work?

Showing up at the top of the map results is easy with Google Maps ads. Once you create your ad campaign, your local search ad can show up in three places: mobile search results, the Google Maps app, or in the Maps section on desktop devices. 

How much do Google Maps ads cost?

Google charges a standard cost-per-click (CPC) for promoting your client’s GBP on Google Maps with local search ads. Here is the type of clicks Google charges for:

• Get location detail clicks
• Get direction clicks
• Mobile clicks-to-call clicks
• Website clicks

Types of Google Maps Ads

The way your ad shows on the map results can vary depending on the device, the search engine and/or app they use, and the user’s location. Here we’ll highlight how a search query can deliver different results across devices and the Google Maps app.

Here is an example of how ads appear while searching within the Google Maps app on a mobile device:

While you can’t tell from the screenshot, the circled boxes are actually videos that were shown in the ad. This content is being pulled directly from the client’s Google Business Profile.

Think adding images and videos to GBPs is important? Well now you have another advantage to add to the mix, they help improve your ad performance!

How it appears in the maps results while on desktop:

Here is an example of what happens when a user clicks on one of the ads:

As you can see from the screenshot above, the ad works in conjunction with your client’s Google Business Profile, further stressing the importance of having an optimized Google Business Profile that helps capture a user’s attention.

Here is an example of the search results on mobile:

You’ve probably already noticed this by now, but Google has also been experimenting with serving Google Guaranteed Ads (Local Services Ads) in the map results. The example above shows this.

As Google continues to expand Local Service Ads, we should expect this trend to continue with the Google Guaranteed Ad units winning more of these placements. 

Features of Google Maps Ads

There are a number of different features in Google Maps Ads, like promoted pins and featuring specific reviews by customers.

What are promoted pins?

Promoted pins are a paid advertising feature on Google Maps. They allow businesses to appear at the top of the search results for a specific keyword or location. Promoted pins are a great way to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your website or store.

How do promoted pins work?

When someone searches for a keyword or location on Google Maps, promoted pins will appear at the top of the search results. Promoted pins are marked with a red square pin and include the business name, address, phone number, and website. When someone clicks on a promoted pin, they will be taken to a landing page with more information about the business.

Featured Customer Reviews

Reviews matter and having a strong rating with a healthy number of reviews can greatly impact the performance and success of your ads. They are one of the main pieces Google uses when displaying businesses locally in the search and map results. Think back to the last time you purchased a product or service, if you are like 76% of consumers, chances are you probably read the online reviews and those reviews impacted your decision on which brand or company to purchase from. 

Here is an interesting example of where Google is showcasing GBP reviews in the map pins. This further highlights the importance of reviews and how having a solid process in place for your client’s reputation management is an important ingredient to their online success.

As a rule of thumb, I like to tell clients that they should have at least 25 to 50 reviews before considering testing Google Local Search Ads. 

When a user clicks on a promoted pin in the map results, they can see the review summary, read highlighted reviews, and get an overall sense of your client’s business.

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In-Store Promotions

Do your clients ever run any promotions or special offers? By using promotion assets or utilizing Promotions in Google Merchant Center, you can incentivize people to be more likely to choose your products or services when searching nearby on Google. 

Here is an example of a local Best Buy running a Memorial Day sale and their promotion being displayed in the ‘in-store’ results:

Local Inventory Search

In a world of instant gratification, having the ability to showcase your client’s products at the top of the ‘in-store’ results can be a nice way to boost sales and increase foot traffic. Local inventory ads are a feature that allows you to showcase your client’s products and store information for shoppers searching nearby. 

Local inventory ads are available by adding your client’s products to their Google Business Profile or uploading them in mass to Google Merchant Center to then sync with the GBP. Here is a guide from Google to get started. 

Here are the core benefits Google highlights with Local Inventory Ads:

• • Promote your in-store inventory. Let shoppers see that you have the products they’re looking for, at the moment they are searching.
  • Bring your local store online. Provide users with a robust, digital storefront experience by leveraging Google’s merchant-hosted local storefront feature.

• Highlight your store pickup options directly on your local inventory ads.

• • Pickup today feature
  • Pickup later for local inventory ads
  • Pickup later for shopping ads

• Measure performance. You can monitor the impact of your ads by tracking online and in-store performance.

How To Advertise on Google Maps with Google Local Search Ads

Google Local Search Ads are a type of online advertising that allows businesses to appear at the top of the search results in their desired areas. These ads are shown when someone searches for a business, service or product on Google Maps or Google Search, and they include the business’s name, address, phone number, and website.

Here Are The Steps:

Step 1: Set up and optimize your Google Business Profile

First and foremost, does your client have a GBP and is it optimized? Make sure that the Google Business Profile is synced with the ad account and is optimized to look compelling to potential leads. 

How To Sync Your GBP With Google Ads:

• In the ad account, you will look for Assets which is under Ads and Assets. 
• Click the blue plus sign button “create asset”.
• Then click the Location Assets to follow the steps to sync your GBP.

Manage multiple businesses from one ad account

You can link multiple business profiles to an ad account. If you have multiple GBP profiles under your manager account, make sure to use the filter feature to segment out the desired GBP profile(s); otherwise, you run the risk of your other client’s business profiles accidentally showing in your ads. 

Step 2: Create a Google Ads campaign

• Go to the Google Ads website and sign in to your account.
• Click on the “Campaigns” tab.
• Click on the “New campaign” button.
• Select a campaign objective based on your client’s goals: Sales, Leads, or Local Store Visits

• Choose from the available campaign types:
  • Performance Max Campaigns.
  • Search Campaigns.

• Follow the prompts after selecting your campaign type. This part of the process will guide you through setting up your budget, targeting and ad copy.
• Once you complete the initial campaign creation process, go back and make sure you are utilizing all relevant ad extensions. For instance, make sure under Location Assets, that you have the client’s GBP synced with the ad account and campaign(s).

Choosing Between Campaign Types

Search Campaigns

Google’s OG ad unit, the standard text ads most people are familiar with when it comes to Google Ads. I like this campaign type because it allows you to get as granular and specific as you’d like with your keyword targeting. Want to show up for a specific set of terms, in a specific area? Search ads with exact-match keywords make for the perfect solution. Want to also add some audience targeting, like narrowing your targeting to people in the higher income brackets? Search ads allow you to do that and more.

Performance Max Campaigns

Google’s latest campaign type combines the available ad units to reach audiences across all of Google with a single campaign. Performance Max campaigns, once properly set up, tend to require less bandwidth post-launch to further optimize their performance. The key things to keep in mind with Performance Max:

Take advantage of all available ad extensions, headlines and descriptions.

• If your client has good video creative on YouTube, I suggest using that. 
• Make sure that you also add images, if the client doesn’t have any creative handy, Google can scan the client’s website or will provide you with stock imagery to choose from.

Conversion tracking is crucial to the success of a Performance Max campaign. The mindset behind this campaign type is that you are letting Google’s system leverage its various data and touch points to determine and identify your target audience to serve ads to. Don’t skip this step, with solid conversion tracking, you are providing Google’s system with clean data to optimize around

Give your campaign a headstart by building an audience signal. Remember that keyword research you did, this becomes a great tool by creating a custom audience segment and using those keywords to target people who are actively searching for your keywords or are showing that search intent.

Tips for Getting Your Ads to Show More Frequently in the Map Results

• Make sure the Google Business Profile listing is complete and accurate.
• Use relevant keywords in your listing.
• Write compelling ad copy that will make people want to click on your ad.
• Utilize all relevant ad extensions to add more information to your ad, such as your phone number, address, and website.
• Track your results by setting up conversion tracking and make adjustments to your campaign as needed.

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Advanced Tips and Tricks:

• Utilize bid adjustments for device types. To win the map ad placement, you have to have a competitive enough bid to secure a placement that is at the top of the search results. Since a lot of map traffic is from mobile devices, adding a bid adjustment to bid more for mobile devices is a way to try and show up more on the maps without having to get overly aggressive with your keyword bids.
• The advanced bid adjustment is another feature that helps your ads rank higher in the search results, it is a bid adjustment geared towards helping you win the call extension placement. Since the map ad results feature the business’s phone number, this can be another method used to tweak your campaign to focus more on showing up in the map results.  

Common Mistakes and Pitfalls To Avoid

When it comes to Google Ads, SEO and marketing in general, testing is key as there are a lot of approaches you can take. With that said, here are some ideas to keep in mind:

Make Sure You Set Up Conversion Tracking

• Google is a data-orientated company and its algorithm thrives on data. Taking that concept to heart, you should make sure that you are properly feeding your lead data back into Google. When you feed accurate data to the ad platform, then the system can better optimize towards your desired goals: produce more leads or sales for your clients. 
• Conversion tracking can be set up in a number of ways: 
  • Use GA/GA4 to track the user journey on your client’s site
  • Create Google Ads pixels and install them on your client’s site.
  • Use a lead/call tracking platform like CallRail, which can do a lot of the technical work for you and provide clear insights into the leads your client gets by tracking across their various marketing channels. It also integrates with a number of platforms, like Google Ads and Google Business Profiles, Facebook, WordPress, Zapier, etc.

Keyword Targeting and Keyword Match Types:

One of the most common mistakes I see people make with Google Ads is that they take too broad of an approach with their targeting. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. Here are some common things to look out for:

• When it comes to Search campaigns, keyword match types are important. Avoid starting out with the broad match type, it can lead to wasted spend if you don’t have a solid negative keyword list already. Broad match should be considered once your campaign is already producing consistent results and you are looking for additional opportunities you may have not already considered/been targeting. I suggest starting with exact match or phrase match.
• For keyword targeting, you will get the best results by focusing on the keywords and traffic that have ‘buying intent’. Also, it helps to target your client’s products and services that have the best margins or generate the greater revenue and returns. Try to put yourself in the shoes of the consumer. As digital marketers, it is easy for us to default to industry lingo, whereas the average consumer will be thinking in terms of problems and solutions. 

For example, you have a roofer client and they want leads for people who need a new roof. I wouldn’t normally advise making assumptions, but it would be safe to say that the average consumer probably doesn’t know much about roofs and the roofing industry. As a consumer, would I know I need a new roof or would I start with the hope that I just need repairs? What if I go a step further by simplifying my search for just a roofer? The point is, people are more likely to search for the ‘root’ or common terminology since they know there is an issue with their roof and a roofer is the appropriate person to inquire with. 

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How to Incorporate Google Ads to Support Your SEO Efforts

I’ve always said the key to success for local businesses on Google comes down to three main components: reviews, SEO, and Google Ads. Reviews are the lifeblood of your client’s business and help supplement their organic rankings and improve the conversion rates of their paid ads. 

We all know with SEO, when done correctly, provides tremendous value for local businesses; however, just like any worthwhile endeavor in life, there are no shortcuts to instant overnight success, unless you win the lottery, but we’re not counting on luck here. Improving a client’s organic rankings takes time and patience on behalf of your client to wait three to six months to start experiencing the impact of your work. 

In a world of instant gratification, this is where Google Ads becomes a great compliment to the SEO services you are offering to your clients. 

Google Map Ads can be a great tool for getting your client’s business noticed by potential customers. You can use it to target high-value keywords and directly in the desired locations that your clients want to show up in. Even with a couple of hundred dollars in ad spend, you can boost your client’s visibility and start getting leads right away while waiting for the results of your SEO efforts to kick in. 

Conclusion

By harnessing the power of Google Ads and promoted pins, businesses can significantly improve their visibility in Google Maps’ map results. Remember to optimize Google Business Profiles, create effective campaigns, utilize ad extensions, and track conversions for optimal results. Combining Google Ads with local SEO efforts provides a comprehensive strategy to maximize online success for local businesses.

Searching for services like hospitals, hotels, and restaurants on Google will give you local establishments at the top of the results. This is entirely by design. Google uses your location to provide you with a list of businesses in your area.

But what exactly is hyperlocal marketing, and what does it involve? And how does it differ from the traditional marketing strategies you’ve been deploying?

This brief guide will go through the basics and benefits of hyperlocal marketing. I’ll then show you six practical examples of how to run a hyperlocal campaign for your audience. By the end, you’ll understand what “hyperlocal” really means, and how to run this sort of marketing campaign for your business.

What is hyperlocal marketing?

Hyperlocal marketing involves targeting prospects in a specific geographic location. The idea behind this strategy is to optimize a business for “near me” searches to generate more foot traffic or inquiries.

Let’s say you’ve moved to a new city and are looking for a gym. You don’t want to drive for miles to get to your old gym, so you’re probably going to search for something like “gyms near me.” The search results that appear at the top are not there by chance. These businesses have optimized their online presence with hyperlocal marketing strategies to show up at the top.

The same strategy can be employed by virtually any business operating a physical store. Coffee shops, restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, bookstores, salons, and many other businesses all run hyperlocal marketing.

Consumers’ attitudes on “near me” queries have shifted dramatically in the last few years. Previously, most people used to include the tag “near me” in their queries. That’s not the case anymore. Data from Google shows that people simply search for a restaurant or store and expect the search engine to serve the nearest results automatically:

Source

Google has adjusted its algorithm in recent years to enhance local search. Not only does it serve the specific results the user is asking for, but it also provides related businesses under the “More Things To Do” and “Discovery” sections. This means that businesses using hyperlocal marketing can get more foot traffic and overall brand visibility from exact local queries and other related searches.

Now let’s look at how this marketing technique is beneficial and why you should employ it in your company.

What are the benefits of hyperlocal marketing?

One of the most significant benefits of hyperlocal marketing is its cost-effectiveness. The strategy is localized, so you’re only spending a portion of your marketing budget to target a well-defined population. It keeps you from straining your limited budget with ads reaching people who probably won’t visit your store anyway.

Hyperlocal marketing also yields a high return on investment. First of all, people searching ‘near me’ queries typically have a high purchase intent. That means you won’t need to spend as many resources getting them to convert. Secondly, optimizing your business for specific local queries is more affordable. In essence, the cost of acquiring leads is considerably lower, and a higher proportion of those leads will turn into customers.

Finally, running hyperlocal marketing is easier to manage. You don’t need a big marketing team to keep track of performance metrics. The campaign is a localized market segment within a restricted geographical location, so it’s much less overwhelming compared to larger campaigns.

Next, let’s look at some real examples of hyperlocal marketing in action.

Real examples of hyperlocal marketing campaigns

There are various hyperlocal marketing strategies out there, some more effective than others. The costs involved also vary.

The choice of which strategies to run will ultimately depend on your marketing budget. Key data on your customer base, for example, their presence on social media, will also influence which ones to pick.

Having said that, businesses generally get better results when they run multiple hyperlocal marketing strategies and tests. So, let’s look at some of the best techniques you should consider for your next campaign.

1. Hyperlocal marketing on Google Ads

Running hyperlocal marketing campaigns is easy using Google Ads. They provide tools that let you customize your target location as much as you want. The beauty of this is it allows you to focus on the specific location you want without wasting resources on unnecessary areas.

Setting up a hyperlocalized campaign is pretty straightforward. First, you need to choose the location for your campaign. To do this, log into your Google Ads account and pick the campaign you want. Next, click on “Settings” then “Advanced search,” and you will see two options, “Location” and “Radius,” choose ‘radius’.

From here, you’ll need to pick the center of your campaign, preferably your store’s physical location, and then set up your ideal radius.

To get the best results from your campaigns, conduct simple research to identify where your customers are based. You can then use the data to choose the perfect radius that covers all the necessary neighborhoods you want.

In the example below, we used ‘2110 El Cajon Blvd in San Diego’ as our central point, and set the radius to 10 miles:

With the geolocation done, it’s now time to identify your keywords. You’ll need to do local keyword research to identify relevant opportunities.

Referencing the gym example mentioned earlier, a gym could bid for keywords such as “gyms near me,” “gyms san diego,” and “gyms in san diego.” Establishments like drug stores  can target keywords such as “24-hour drug store near me” and “24-hour drug store san diego.”

2. Hyperlocal marketing with social ads

Social media platforms also provide incredible hyperlocal marketing capabilities, and as you may have guessed, no-one does it better than Facebook.

Hyperlocal marketing on Facebook was introduced back in 2014 under “Local awareness ads.” The format allows businesses to customize their ads extensively for highly targeted campaigns.

Setting up the campaign is very intuitive. Just click on the green “Create” button from your ad manager dashboard:

Choose “Brand awareness” from the next menu. You’ll then be asked to provide additional details on your campaign, including campaign name, budget, etc.

What you need to pay more attention to target when running hyperlocal marketing is the location setting. Choose your central point and desired radius:

If you’ve set it up already, the tool will pull your business address automatically. If it doesn’t, you’ll need to set it up manually before proceeding.

The tool will then show your central point and coverage. You can increase or reduce the radius as you wish.

Next, it’s time to customize the campaign. Facebook allows you to customize your campaigns in different ways. For example, you can choose the age, gender, language, and even interests of the people you want to target.

Here is how our example for a gym business could look like with specific targeting:

Moreover, you can determine who sees the ads in a given location. You could, for instance, choose to display your ads to everyone living within your coverage area. That includes individuals who have the area set up as their residence on their profiles and people who Facebook determines live in the area.

There is also the option of “people recently in this location.” The option targets both the residents and visitors of your coverage area:

Facebook coverage areas do not extend to other countries. So, if your business is located in a border town, don’t expect your ads to show up for customers located in nearby countries within your target radius. You’ll have to create a separate campaign for them.

Besides the customization options, Facebook’s local awareness ads are also a favorite among many marketers due to how easy they are to monitor. The company provides various analytics to help you keep track of who sees your ads. They don’t provide specific figures, but they offer a percentage that is still useful.

Of course, I’d be remiss without mentioning that hyperlocal marketing through social media goes beyond just getting your display ad in front of your target audience. You need to also engage with them. According to recent research, 64% of consumers feel more connected to brands that engage with them on social media. An intuitive way to ensure you’re not missing out on conversations with your audience is to monitor Facebook ad comments for responses, mentions, and helpful feedback.

3. Local content marketing

Hyperlocal marketing works even better when you localize your content strategy to address the needs of your target location. To do that, start creating content with that location in mind. That means adjusting the tone and references used in your content to match the area you’re targeting.

Say you are a kayaking business located in San Diego, and you have a blog. Instead of creating generalized kayaking blog posts, you can center your content around San Diego. Not only does this boost your local SEO, but it also makes the content more relatable to your target audience. Combine this with a Google My Business listing, and you’re likely looking at a high position on the SERP.

But that alone isn’t enough. Businesses that cover local events perform even better. Do your research and identify festivals, corporate events, community activities, pop-ups, and other similar events you can participate in. Then create relevant content covering these events and share it with your audience.

Remember, you don’t have to publish hyperlocal content on your website all the time. Sometimes even simple Instagram posts are enough to show that you’re integrated with the local community.

Here’s an example from the restaurant Pies ‘n’ Thighs:

Source

The New York-based restaurant partnered with other local businesses to support essential workers during the pandemic. Aside from helping essential workers, Pies ‘n’ Thighs also managed to collaborate with like-minded businesses, which could lead to business later on.

Your business doesn’t have to bear the burden of local community engagement on its own. Find another business or two with shared interests and organize some activities for your community.

4. Advertisements to raise local awareness

There’s no doubt that digital marketing has transformed the way brands advertise their products. However, there’s still room for offline advertising, especially in hyperlocal marketing. And the best part is that it’s super affordable since you’re focusing your efforts on a small location and not an entire city or country.

What offline marketing techniques are available to you? Local newspapers, magazines, flyers, pamphlets, and business cards are some of the options at your disposal. You can work with your staff to distribute these items around your coverage location. You can also partner with a reputable business in the area and have your flyers displayed in their establishment.

Source

Community engagement is another great offline marketing technique. Participate in community service and be an active player in events taking place in the area. Doing so will help raise your profile and bring your brand and community closer together.

5. Local SEO

You need an effective local SEO strategy to boost your visibility online. There are three main items to take care of here: customer reviews, citations, and Google My Business optimization.

Customer reviews are vital for your SEO and buyer journey. Great reviews act as social proof and can drive more traffic to your business. Increased traffic signals to search engines that your content has authority, and this increases your rankings. In fact, it’s become widely known that reviews and ratings are one of the most important local SEO factors to consider.

Citations boost your business’s trustworthiness, so they’re a crucial ranking factor. Moreover, citations give you tons of referral traffic, especially if your business is listed on reputable online directories.

Additionally, multiple studies show Google My Business is another important ranking factor:

Source

Listing your business on GMB alone isn’t enough to move the needle. What you need to do next is ensure your listing is optimized.

Analyze the competition and optimize your GMB profile for the best results. You may do it by adding your address, contact details, business hours, and business description. To further optimize, you can schedule GMB posts like events, special offers, hourly updates, any local mandates (like we’ve seen with the pandemic), and other news.

Be sure to continuously monitor your metrics and adjust your strategy accordingly to stay ahead of your competitor—there are plenty of local SEO tools to make this process simple! These tools provide valuable analytics to help you make informed decisions. Some tools will even place your data side by side with the competition, showing you where you can do better. You can even track your hyperlocal rankings on Google Maps using a geolocation rank tracker that displays your rankings in a grid across the map.

6. Business phone marketing

Finally, when your store shows up in the near-me search results, prospective customers may want to contact your business with questions regarding something they didn’t catch in your GMB posts or updates. One of the most common ways you’ll be contacted is through your business phone number:

Source

Some of the best hyperlocal marketing your business can do is answering customer inquiries and resolving complaints via phone. I know, it’s technically an offline activity, but the data above supports that this is the type of service customers expect from their local businesses.

Larger businesses may have a virtual phone number listed on their website or Google My Business page which routes calls to a hosted contact center. The difference here is that instead of a store employee answering the phone, it’s an off-site team of support agents.

Regardless of who’s picking up the phone on behalf of your business, make sure the service is customer-centric around their question or issue. The service should be prompt and the customer shouldn’t be bounced around between multiple teams. Finally, be empathetic to your customers over the phone. A lack of empathy could reflect poorly on your brand and detract someone from visiting your business.

Your customer experience over the phone could be the difference between a customer leaving a positive or a negative review that then shows up on your GMB page.

The bottom line

In this post, we learned that hyperlocal marketing can benefit your business in various ways. By running ads that target a small geographical location you can boost foot traffic to a store or location, as well as improve the visibility of the brand. 

One of the best things about focusing on hyperlocal marketing is that it achieves its goals without taking too much of your time or budget. Hyperlocal is affordable, has a high ROI, and is fairly easy to manage for the local business owner.

I hope these actionable examples help to bring hyperlocal marketing to life, and that you’ll use these as inspiration to emulate within your own businesses, or those of your clients. I wish you the best of luck finding new customers in your neighborhood! 

It’s rather clear that they are two different channels.

Search engine optimization focuses on increasing organic traffic from search engines. Pay-per-click campaigns generate leads through paid ads. However, both strategies have the same goal—they aim to capture more leads and improve sales. 

So why not use SEO and PPC together…it’s only logical, right? You’ll dominate the SERPs, drive more traffic, get more brand visibility, and so on.

The question shouldn’t be whether to use PPC or SEO, but rather how do you combine the two to get the best possible results for your business?

This review will show you how to use each strategy to support the other. You’ll learn about the different types of paid ads you can employ for your business, and the importance of selecting the right attribution model when combining these two marketing techniques. 

Why Use SEO and PPC Together?

SEO and PPC are different in various ways, but they can work harmoniously to produce amazing results. Here’s how they’ll benefit your business:

1. Brand Presence

Relying on SEO alone to boost brand visibility is a tall order. That’s because search engine optimization strategies can take months or even years to produce results. Until then, your business will remain buried with the thousands of websites that never make it to the first page of the SERPs. That essentially means that your business won’t be getting any meaningful visibility.

All that changes when you introduce a local PPC campaign to work alongside your SEO efforts. Pay-per-click ads help you bypass the algorithms and appear at the top of the SERPs for specific keywords. So everyone searching for those keywords will come across your ads and, by extension, your brand. That means more visibility for your business.

Combining PPC and SEO allows you to establish your brand’s presence for both the short- and long-term. PPC will help you get the exposure you need right now as SEO works in the background to ensure the results are sustainable.

2. Increase Sales and Generate More Leads

Websites on the first page of the SERPs get 71% of the online traffic, as reported by Moz. In fact, most of this traffic is limited to the top five websites:

Source: Moz

A pay-per-click ad takes your store to the very top of search query results. So it’ll be the first thing people see, and this will naturally attract more clicks. Assuming your landing page converts, more clicks mean more leads and, consequently, more sales. 

But you’ll still need a robust SEO strategy because not everyone will click on the ads. In fact, a report by Wordstream showed the average click-through rate of PPC Adword ads is around 2%. 

Your goal should be to dominate the SERPs as much as possible, and the only way to do that is to have an effective PPC and SEO campaign in place. It takes a lot of effort and investment, but the results are well worth it. In fact, if you do it properly, you will get double exposure on the SERPs. Potential customers will see your ads first thing at the top and then in the organic results.

Something else very interesting about dominating the SERPs is the psychological effect it has on consumers. When potential customers come across your store multiple times on the same page, they’re likely to see your store as reputable and authoritative. That increases the chances of winning their confidence and clicks.

3. Test Keyword and Content

Keyword optimization is crucial for both SEO and PPC campaigns. Your SEO team needs to know which keywords to use to optimize content and boost rankings. Similarly, your ad campaigns can’t be successful if you don’t know which keywords to bid for. 

So how do you know which keywords and phrases to target? There are various tools to help you out with this. However, you can’t truly know which keywords work best for your specific business until you put them into action. Using SEO and PPC at the same time provides the perfect opportunity to do exactly that.

You could, for instance, run a PPC campaign targeting multiple keywords. Then compare the data of each keyword after a month or so. Which keyword and content generated the most engagements and leads? Pass this information to your SEO team, and they can run campaigns targeting these keywords.

The beauty of using PPC for such tests is it produces results instantly. You can get all the data you need in a matter of weeks.

SEO can also be used for keyword and content testing. However, search engine optimization takes time to produce results, and that’s why most businesses complement it with PPC. But, if your company already has a successful SEO strategy in place, then you should have enough keyword data for your ad campaigns.

Next, let’s look at how you can run each method to support the other.

How to Start an SEO Campaign to Support PPC

SEO is a long game, but it generates valuable insights that can support your PPC efforts in various ways. For instance, once your website’s SEO finally kicks in, you’ll see a massive increase in traffic.

As you probably already know, most leads do not convert during their first visit to a website. You’ll need to interact with a potential customer several times to move them down the marketing funnel until they take the desired action. And that’s where PPC comes in.

SEO provides valuable data on potential customers to whom you can run a retargeting campaign using PPC. Moreover, local SEO techniques like Google My Business listings and optimization can significantly improve the performance of your PPC campaigns. 

Listing your business on Google My Business allows you to utilize tools such as ad extensions. The extension allows you to provide more details through your ads. For example, they’ll display customer reviews providing social proof for your business.

How to Start a PPC Campaign to Support SEO

One of the biggest advantages of PPC campaigns is how quickly they generate results. Whether you want more brand visibility, leads, or sales, a pay-per-click ad will deliver the results faster than SEO can. Therefore you can use PPC to get the quick results that your SEO team needs.

You could, for instance, use PPC to build brand awareness quickly. Potential customers will get familiarized with your brand making it easier for them to interact with your business organically. 

PPC can also enrich your SEO keyword data. A single PPC campaign can generate lots of data on customer search habits. You can then use this data to improve your website’s SEO to drive more traffic.

Let’s say, for instance, you are running Google Ads for your Salon. Two weeks in, you start noticing that the keyword “hair salon” is performing much better in terms of clicks and CPC than something like “hairdresser.” Yet your website keeps on mentioning “hairdresser” and nothing about “hair salon.” 

Such data will help your SEO team adjust your website to cover all the traffic you lose by not mentioning “hair salon.”

Type of Paid Ad Campaigns You Might Run

There are various types of paid ads out there. Below are two strategies for paid ad campaigns that can actually produce meaningful results for your business:

1. Direct Sales

As the name suggests, direct sales ads are all about selling a product or service. That means that ads are aimed at consumers towards the end of the customer journey and ready to make a purchase:

Source: Facebook

Under direct sales, you can run remarketing ads targeting the website visitors who visit your sales page and fail to take the desired action.

PPC campaigns on branded terms are also a great option here. They’ll help you crowd the SERPs, thereby increasing clicks. Targeting branded terms also helps to counter any competitors who could be creeping into your market. 

Many businesses bid on the branded terms of their competitors. So if you are not careful, your competition could bid on your brand terms and steal a significant portion of your traffic and sales. That happens a lot to hotels where companies like Booking or Agoda bid on branded terms for a specific hotel.

2. Lead Capture

Up to 92% of website visitors aren’t ready to make a purchase during their first visit. Most of them are merely curious to learn more about a company, product, or service. Therefore, trying to sell a product to such visitors is usually a waste of resources.

That’s why a lead capture campaign is important. It helps you capture consumers who are still in the early stages of the buyers’ journey. You can then use their information to retarget them later on and move them down your sales funnel.

The basic idea behind a lead capture ad is to get the lead’s contact details. It could be an email address or their phone number. To get this information, you may have to incentivize the consumer.

If, for instance, you have a small interior designing business, you can target a lead with a free ebook or guide on something like “Tips On Choosing The Right Color Palette For Your Home.” Most leads will freely trade their contact details for such a guide. So you’ll get the contact information you want, and they’ll acquire the resources they need. Win-win.

The marketing agency, King Kong, takes this approach, for example. If you visit their site, you will get retargeting ads sending you to the following landing page.

Instead of trying to directly sell to the customer, they send them to a landing page that they created with a website builder where they give away a free resource. It’s a smart move that helps warm a lead before a pitch.

The Importance of Attribution When Tracking Results

Running marketing campaigns across different channels does come with a few challenges. One of them is identifying the channel that was responsible for a conversion. 

Did the customer buy your product after encountering your local service ads or the organic search results? Getting the answer to this question is beneficial.

Attribution provides valuable insights into how the various marketing channels are performing. It shows you which channel has the biggest impact. With this information at hand, you can refine your marketing strategy to prioritize the best-performing channels.

There are several types of attribution models that you could use here. These include First Interaction, Last Interaction, Last Non-Direct Click, Linear Attribution, Time Decay, and Position-Based attribution.

It’s imperative that you understand how each model works and its implications. For instance, both first and last interaction models credit a single channel for a conversion:

Source: Search Engine Land

The first interaction credits the first channel the buyer interacted with, while the last interaction credits the last channel before a conversion. While this makes the models very easy to implement and evaluate, it also oversimplifies a buyer’s interaction with your marketing channels. The last interaction model, for example, ignores all the touchpoints that occurred prior to the conversion.

To avoid such issues, it’s advisable to use more than one model. That will make the attribution process a bit more complex, but you will get a holistic picture of how all your marketing channels are performing.

Conclusion

Let’s do a quick recap, shall we? In this article, I shared four main things. First, I showed you why you need to use PPC and SEO together. Then I explained how the two complement each other to boost brand awareness, increase sales and leads, and facilitate keyword testing.

Next, I took you through practical examples on how you can use each strategy to support the other. We saw that SEO could generate leads that you can retarget through PPC. On the other hand, PPC enriches your SEO keyword data and delivers quick results that are hard to achieve with SEO.

We then looked at the two types of paid ads you can run, direct sales and lead capture. Finally, I gave you three reasons why you’ll need attribution when tracking the results of this multi-channel marketing strategy.

To sum it up, your local business needs SEO as much as it needs PPC. The benefits you’ll harness by integrating the two are far greater than anything you can achieve using just one of them. So, sit down with your marketing team and develop an effective strategy on how to run the two techniques together. 

But, before we get started thinking about what’s to come for 2021, how did our experts fare with what they predicted in 2020?

Reflecting on 2020’s Local SEO Predictions

A lot happened in 2020, but how many of our experts’ local SEO predictions came true? 

Unfortunately, a lot of our pros had hoped 2020 would see a reduction in spam, but with the introduction of new Covid-19 support, resources, and features, plus limited Google My Business support, it seems Google had other things besides spam-fighting to keep them busy…

We may not have seen the back of spam, but some of our experts did successfully predict some pretty major GMB news.

Google My Business

Towards the end of the year, Whitespark’s Local Search Ranking Factors survey showed just how important having an active and optimized GMB profile really is. With GMB being voted the number one local search ranking factor, it’s no surprise that it was top of the list when it came to our experts’ local search predictions…

Monetized Google My Business

Last year, one of our pros (hats off, Andrew!) correctly predicted that we might begin to see the long-standing GMB pay-to-play rumors come to fruition. As GMB’s $50/month upgraded listings test took the local SEO community by storm, is this something we can expect to see more from in the new year?

Local Services Ads

2020 brought with a lot of changes to Google My Business, but even more prominent were Local Services Ads, which took the spotlight. There were plenty of changes to the popular paid option, but what more can we expect from it in the coming year?

Zero-click Search

What felt like a big phenomenon last year doesn’t seem to be quite so high on our experts’ radars this year. That said, with the introduction of GMB’s direct edit, can we expect more emphasis to be placed on in-SERP actions than ever before?

Maps Spam

What would a local SEO piece be without at least some talk of spam? Well, we’ve got plenty for you here. Will it improve or could it possibly get worse? Our pros chime in to talk all things #StopCrapontheMap.

Online Reviews

As the second most important local search ranking factor, it’s no surprise that reviews should remain front of mind throughout 2021. Our experts discuss how reviews might gain even more prominence in the coming year.

Links and Link Building

Link building has stood the test of time when it comes to helping businesses rank in search results, but how can building relevant links help local businesses in 2021?

Conclusion

When it comes to local, things can change pretty quickly. What do you think of our experts’ local SEO and Google predictions? Can we expect to see paid-for GMB profiles come to life? Will review responses gain even more importance as a ranking factor? And the big question: will Google finally put a stop to crap on the map?! (No shade Google, we know you’re working on it!)

Whether you agree or not, we want to hear your own search predictions for the coming year! Share your 2021 local SEO prediction with us in the comments below.

In our June webinar, InsideLocal host Myles Anderson was joined by Ignitor Digital‘s Mary Bowling, Steady Demand‘s Ben Fisher, and SearchLab‘s Greg Gifford to answer the big questions:

• Why is Google asking these questions now? Is there anything the timing can teach us?
• How would ‘pay-to-play’ features affect agency services and pricing?
• Do the new features present big opportunities to the local businesses willing to pay for them?
• Is there a threat of GMB going fully into a subscription model?

If you missed it, the webinar recording is available to watch below. We’ve also written up a summary of our favorite insights from the discussion. If you’d like to refer to the slidedeck, please visit the resources section below.

For more reactions to Google My Business’s survey, take a look at our poll on the topic, ‘[Poll Results] Google My Business – Would You Pay to Play?’

Contents

• Webinar recording
• Summary
• Resources
• Q&A

Video – Is ‘Pay to Play’ the Future of Google My Business?

Summary

What Was the GMB Survey?

In April, Google My Business sent out a survey to users asking for thoughts on potential new features, and suggesting the possibility of a paid model. Google listed 20 features, asking people to choose which features they liked most.

There was a mix of reactions from the local SEO industry, but what did the panel think?

Mary Bowling, co-founder at Ignitor Digital, said: “When I read through the survey, I first thought, ‘We can already do some of these things on Google My Business, are they really going to charge us?’ I also thought that some of these things are so much like the old Yellow Pages or the way Yahoo! Local used to be. I think that if Google keeps this up, they could easily become more hated than Yelp by trying to nickel and dime people to death. My initial reaction is that Google is putting a tariff on this, and eventually will consumers pay for that. If small businesses have to pay this, we have to pass it on, and everybody’s services become more expensive.”

Greg Gifford answered, “I had hair before the survey came out, and I pulled it all out trying to get through it, because it took forever. I’ve talked to a lot of people that received the survey, and I really think the only people that got through were digital marketers that wanted to see what was in there. Some of the stuff is already available, but some of the stuff is absolute wackiness that I don’t know where they’re trying to go with it. From an agency perspective, it’s not so great, but I think Google is looking at the layperson that doesn’t have an agency or someone on staff to handle this. Some of the features might be beneficial. If I was a small business owner and didn’t know squat, I’d pay $20 a month to have access to a support person to talk to. I’m kind of on the fence: it’s kind of dumb, some might have some merit, some are crazy.”

Ben Fisher said, “My initial reaction was that this was some new guy in the Google My Business product team using his 20% time, probably an engineer as it seemed like they didn’t know how to put together a survey. Some of the features were horrifying, how could someone think to offer these types of services? Some are great ideas, some are potential features we may see in GMB in the future. When Google is developing these features, they’re always looking towards the low end of the spectrum – the iPhone repair guy who’s not going to pay an agency to do anything. We have to look at these things through that lens, they’re not looking at what will help an agency or a chain.”

What Might Happen as a Result of the Survey?

The panel agreed that it is unlikely Google would have got any usable results from the survey due to its length and format.

Mary said, “Access to support is different from getting good support. People would be willing to pay for support if they were assured they could speak to someone who could actually do something about their problem. The support is so bad, it’s almost unbelievable that somebody could put out a product and not support it like Google does.”

Greg went on to discuss the driving force of the survey. “If I had the ability to switch to an animated gif, I’d do one with dollar bills raining down. I remember having conversations 5 years ago with SEOs about the possibility of Google charging services. We all forget Google’s not here to be our friend, it’s here to make money. Some of these features have already been released into the wild and they see it working, why not let other people have access and make a little coin?”

Mary went on to explain Google’s earnings. “The latest figures I saw, Google made $9 billion in the US last year, and about $32 billion worldwide. I do not feel sorry for Google that they need more money, and that the small businesses are the ones that have to give it to them.”

Ben countered, “Of course Google needs to make money, and they have to have a division with a userbase that is generating income, or money for another product. We see in Google My Business there’s always been an upgrade path to AdWords Express. In the new homepage dashboard, we’ve seen a secondary upgrade path to GSuite. But this is such a half-baked survey, I think that if we see these features most won’t be paid. Some might end up becoming premium, but whenever they look at things for GMB they go to the lowest common denominator. But will it happen? I don’t really think so.”

Myles asked if Google’s local monopoly could be the reason for the survey. Greg responded, “I don’t think it’s that they’re not making money off AdWords Express. These are possible areas they could expand into and charge for that some businesses may think it’s worth paying for. It’s another revenue stream: you’re going to top out on AdWords and other things, this is another revenue stream that businesses that don’t know any better will pay for.”

Mary went on to discuss the new features added to GMB. “I think a lot of the features that have come out in the last few years are very useful. Some of them are quite trackable, and have been proving the value of GMB more and more, which may give them the hutzpah to say, ‘Now I want you to pay me for them.’

Which Features Might Google My Business Be Planning? 

Google’s survey contained 20 possible new features, but which are the panel most excited – and worried – about?

Conversions and Leads

Mary discussed the value of new features relating to conversions and leads: “The ‘Book’ button already appears on many GMB profiles. This is an easy thing to sell because it’s trackable. Showing conversions has been an issue in local search since day one, with most transactions being completed offline with no way to track them, so Google has figured out things that they could give us that allow us to track their value to us.

“I think getting leads from competitor profiles is very Yelp-like, and a slap in the face to small businesses. We can already do Offers through Google Posts. The Instant Quote is kind of weird. The only way I can see them doing this is by giving them all the information, but if you’re using your ‘Products and Services’ tabs in GMB, you’re already giving them a lot of information that they could work with to provide quotes. I think leads and conversion features are appealing to small business owners, but also somewhat appealing to agencies as it’s trackable, and helps them prove their value.”

Ben continued, “If you look at a lot of the services, doesn’t it remind you of Local Service Ads?”

Myles summarized, “From the point of view of agencies and SMBs, there’s some real opportunity to drive more value out of Google, and understand the value it’s driving.”

Visibility

The panel went on to discuss features helping improve visibility. Greg explained, “The Promoted Pin already exists, though a lot of people don’t have access. Google search results placement is one of the things that made me need to change my Depends when I was doing the survey. That’s just really scary, it’s not saying it’s ad placement, it seems like if you’re paying for this you get an organic boost.”

Myles hypothesized that for SERP placement, any paid-for pack from Google would have to be in a bidding format, rather than the bundles proposed in the survey. He then asked how paid-for elements could limit GMB spam, which the panel had strong opinions on.

“Look at spam in personal injury, they’ll throw a ton of money at it” said Greg. “You only need one client to do a $5 million settlement and paid for all of the money you’ll throw at Google in the next year.”

Ben went on to discuss how spam led to LSAs. “I disagree. LSAs were born from spam in the locksmith and garage door industries. LSA came along and did advanced verification, and Pinkerton doing background checks on everybody, then brought in a bidding service. This curtailed spam. I don’t think that spammers could buy AdWords as they couldn’t prove they were a real entity.”

Customer Services

The survey also contained features that may help local businesses with their customer service.

Ben said, “Automating messaging responses is something Facebook and Google already have, so that’s great. Call reports and recordings would be fantastic to integrate into Google My Business. We have a bit of that through CallJoy for $39 per month. It’s still in a beta phase, but they’ve already got it.”

Mary explained more, “The way Google describes it, questions that are asked a lot that they can respond to, they will. They might take it from Q&A, they might even take it from reviews or any other user-generated content they can get their fingers on. It would mostly be questions that are easy for AI to answer.

Myles summarized, “This could end up saving time for businesses, allowing them to respond faster to customers and give them the answers they need.”

Trust and Verification

Mary discussed her experience with clients and the Google Guarantee (as seen on LSAs): “Businesses put a lot of stock in the Google Guarantee, and I think consumers would do the same.

“We already have background checks in LSAs, and I believe they’re doing this in AdWords too. Verified licenses is something Yelp has just started doing, it’s quite easy for them, all they need to do is scrape the state or city databases for verified licences. Verified bookings would be quite hard for GMB to deal with unless it was through the ‘Book’ button. I think these are good for Google, small businesses, and consumers, because they help weed out suspect businesses that scare everybody.”

Ben went on to why these might have a cost attached. “A background check costs Google money, the Google Guarantee costs up to $2,000, and verified licenses can’t currently be scraped so would have an associated cost. All these trust and verification features are great for the consumer, and they’re great for the business, and great for us as agencies because fewer businesses might be suspended!”

Reviews

Greg shared his thoughts on new features for reviews, “You can kind of already do a Featured Review with Google Posts. I think it’s kind of pointless, it’s like a website testimonial page where it’s only the best of the best to show. Verified Reviews could be cool because there’s a big problem with review spam. Automated review responses is the dumbest idea ever. Why would you want the same generic response posted to every review you get?”

Mary agreed, “One of the biggest things about reviews is actually taking feedback to heart, and using it to improve your business. If you’re just sending out automated responses and ignoring them, a critical part of the process is dropped.”

Ben said, “Research finds that businesses that aren’t restaurants, hotels, or big chains get around 5 reviews per month. For the lowest common denominator, the number of reviews won’t be high enough to warrant this feature.”

Greg continued with more information on review responses: “Google recently changed it so that when businesses respond to reviews, the reviewer gets a message. Clearly, Google knows that as a reviewer it’s important for me to know that the business responded. Why would they turn around and want to automate responses, it’s counter-intuitive.”

Mary shared her thoughts on verified reviews: “There’s such a problem with spam reviews, so if Google can verify reviews, why aren’t they doing it? That should be a core part of Google My Business. If that’s what they need to do it, then they need to get to work.”

In Ben’s experience as a Google Product Expert, he has plenty of thoughts on review spam. “Review spam is really difficult. Most of the Product Experts have shared ideas with Google to fight review spam. Personally, I think verified reviews is a fantastic idea. I would recommend any business pays for that if it gets rid of the review spam issue.”

“Let’s say you pay for verified reviews,” said Mary. “Are unverified reviews going to show up in your review stream along with the verified reviews? That looks ugly to me. If they don’t, and if people drop out, you’ll get fewer reviews than other people.”

Miscellaneous

“Google customer support would be fantastic, and I bet a lot of people would buy it, but a lot of people wouldn’t understand what it means,” said Ben. “For agencies that work with businesses, we’d probably think, ‘Oh, they’ll be able to get unsuspended, they won’t need us! Oh, they’re having a problem with review spam attacks, they don’t need us!’ The form of support that is actually most likely to happen would be how the lowest common denominator gets the most out of GMB. It’s not going to be how to rank better, or what can I do with my website, so I wouldn’t worry about that.

He continued, “Removing ads from your business profile kind of sounds like extortion to me! But would people pay for it? Yes, of course.”

Greg liked the concept of videos in GMB listings, “We can already do this as a Post, but this shows up at the bottom on Desktop. You can load them in elsewhere, but if it got inserted right at the top of your profile, it could be cool. If you could have a nice 30-second video, it would be really easy for consumers to click and hear why you’re awesome. If just depends on how this would actually be implemented.”

Ben followed up, “What would they do, push down reviews, or push down Q&A? There’s only so much space for features.”

Mary said, “I could see it working as another tab on your profile. In a lot of businesses, you’re not buying a business, but you’re buying the person. In those cases, I think allowing the person to sell themselves rather than their products or services would be really useful to consumers.

She continued, “Not every one of these features is great for every type of business. You have to go through and see what’s useful for your lawyer clients compared to your HVAC clients. I think that’s what Google did with those packages, and tried to guess which kinds of industries would be interested in the different packages.”

Is Pay-to-Play the Future of Google My Business?

Greg: “I don’t think it will ever be fully pay-to-play. If we’re lumping everything together and saying, ‘Do you have to pay-to-play to be in Google My Business?’, I think the answer is no. But will there be pay-to-play elements? Yes, I think definitely, it’s a no brainer that we’ve been talking about for years. But I don’t think you’ll have to pay-to-play, I think it will be listing enhancements that may vary on which vertical you’re in.”

Mary: “I agree completely with Greg. I think they want to keep giving us a basic free listing so they don’t have to pay for support for it. If you’re too cheap to pay us, then this is what you get. I think there will be subscription models that will be valuable for different types of businesses. I just hope they are a little bit circumspect, and respect the small business owner when thinking about a lot of these things.

Ben: “I can’t agree more with both Greg and Mary. GMB is, and was, a free product. They’ve rolled out more free features, but is it normal for a business to seek ways to monetize? I don’t think they’ll monetize everything, but I think they’ll monetize some things. I think there’s definitely going to be upgrade paths that appeal to users. At the end of the day, I can say as a Product Expert, they really do listen to feedback. They listen to our feedback, they listen to yours, they monitor #stopcraponthemap. As an industry, we just need to have our voices heard, and I think that’s what this was about. I don’t think they saw a load of users filling the survey out, but I think they saw a lot of agencies filling it out. But will it be 100% pay-to-play? No, I don’t think so.”

Resources

• Webinar Slidedeck [Not included in the recording]
• Search Engine Land: Google may decide to charge for Google My Business listings
• Search Engine Land: Local SEOs mixed, some peeved at idea of paying for Google My Business services
• Search Engine Land: Should we be paying for Google My Business features?
• Optimisey: Google Set to Monetise Google My Business?
• BrightLocal: [Poll Results] Google My Business – Would You Pay to Play? 
• BrightLocal: What Are Google Local Services Ads and Why Should You Care?
• BrightLocal: Local Services Ads Click Study

Q&A

Below are some of the highlights from the live Q&A. Thank you to Sterling Sky’s Colan Nielsen and BrightLocal’s Matt Coghlan for their answers below. You can follow Colan on Twitter here.

Q. Will Pay-to-Play affect location; ie can businesses outside of a given location appear in its 3-pack?

A. “3-pack ads appear to trigger more for users who are close to your location. For example, if your business is located just outside of Houston, someone in Houston searching “realtor Houston” would be likely to see your ad in the 3-pack. A person searching “realtor Houston” who is located in Dallas would not see it.” – Colan Nielsen, Sterling Sky

Q. We’ve already seen how the BnB industry has been affected by ads from booking platforms appearing in their knowledge panel. Do you think that some public-facing features (promoted pins, booking buttons, offers etc.) could make it harder for regular users to tell the difference between paid and organic results, leading to them becoming ubiquitous? If so, how do we pressure Google to develop paid features that support the growth of new businesses, instead of raising overheads for everyone?

A.  The visual difference between what is paid vs organic on Google will continue to become closer and closer. We’ve seen this recently in non-local with Google’s recent update to paid ads on mobile becoming less obvious (see this post if you missed this).” – Matt Coghlan, BrightLocal

Q. Do you think that Google will use new revenue from GMB to make a meaningful impact on spam, or do we need the rise of a serious competitor in local search for this to happen?

A. “This is up for debate right now but personally I believe it’s a bi-product of a solution to make more revenue – I think Google still sees spam as a minor issue with little influence in their overall roadmap.” – Matt Coghlan

Q. Any ideas which GMB features will be a paid feature? And ideas of how much $$?

A. “Your guess is as good as mine at this point.” – Colan Nielsen

Q. How does LSA licensing work in places like the Philippines for the verification? I know the postcards are a real problem because of mail delivery problems.

A. “Interesting question, LSAs are only available in the US right now. If Google looks to roll this out across more countries they’d need a relevant source to check the data against. Most countries will have business registry databases that are publically accessible.”
– Matt Coghlan

Q. Is organic worth the effort anymore for sole traders and small businesses?

A. “100% yes.” – Colan Nielsen

Thanks to everyone who attended live and contributed to the excellent chat.

With numerous changes to the search landscape over the last year, Google Ads continually creates more features that benefit local advertisers. There are also more changes that require improvements in strategy to get Google Ads to work effectively for local businesses. The biggest changes impacting your client’s local businesses have been:

1. Close variant update to Google Ads
2. Increasing use of voice search
3. Ads on Google Maps and Google Map Packs

Let’s break them down…

1. Close Variant Update

For those who have spent time building keyword lists, long tail keywords and refining negative keywords to appear for the most relevant and top performing searches, Google threw a wrench into your plans.

Google Ads now include all close variants based on the intent of the user’s search, not simply misspellings and slight differences to phrases like they have in the past.

This means that your clients are likely going to see additional searches and volume in their accounts, but have no changes to attribute the volume to. The bottom line is that setting it and forgetting can no longer work, so it’s important to stay on top of your keywords and user search queries.

2. Increasing Use of Voice Search

This trend is not exclusive to Google Ads, but it does mean that the traditional method of keyword research has changed for paid advertising. The increasing use of voice search has seen longer tail keywords and inquiry-based searches continue to climb. For local advertisers, having “near me” as part of searches is a must-have, with this search increasing in volume continually.

5-year trend of searches including “near me”

3. Ads on Google Maps and Google Map Packs

As more and more platforms become ‘pay to play’, Google has introduced its fair share of changes based on this model. One of the biggest has been the introduction of and increase in ads on Google Maps and Google Map Packs.

Now, more than ever, it is important to have optimized listings, as well as promoting those listings through Google Ads.

Let’s now focus on how to make Google Ads work for local business, with three unique strategies (but first, if you haven’t linked your Google My Business listing to your Google Ads account, you should do so now).

Three Key Strategies to Get the Most out of Your Google Ads

1. Increase your local search volume

With Google’s update to include close variants of all types, you should see additional searches within your client’s account. However, there are a few methods to ensure you are increasing your local search volume even further.

If you’ve already expanded your keyword list with long-tail keywords, search terms with “near me”, and used broad match modified keywords to rank for all relevant searches, there are two options to expand your reach further.

a) Update Google location targeting settings to include “People in, or who show interest in, your targeted locations (recommended).”

This will bring in additional searches that do not contain local city/state keywords, so it’s imperative that you also add negative locations as well. As an example, if we’re looking to drive visits to a store in Portland, we can expand location settings to include users who are interested in Portland and ensure we exclude the surrounding states, and cities that are a distance away from the city of Portland.

We do this to increase searches for users who are travelling and have shown interest in the area, those who commute to and from our city location, and even those who visit frequently. This targeting will look something like the targeting below:

b) Create broad location-based campaigns

These campaigns would also apply to users who commute to, visit or have shown interest in our specific city location. This includes creating campaigns that target an entire state, or a larger-than-normal radius, while bidding on location-specific keywords.

In this case, we would create a separate campaign and target Oregon as a whole. We would then only bid on keywords containing “Portland” in the search query.

Campaign 1 (Targeting Portland Only) – Keyword: “family lawyer near me”

Campaign 2 (Targeting Oregon and Excluding Portland) – Keyword: “family lawyer Portland”

This is how you can generate additional search volumes for your clients without simply expanding geographic targeting far and away from their physical business location.

2. Google Ads local campaigns – drive more local store visits

Google local campaigns are the simplest way for you to drive local store visits to your client’s business locations. By simply linking and filtering Google My Business locations to your Google Ads account, you can easily create an automated campaign that will promote your location across all Google channels: Search, Display, YouTube, and Maps.

When it comes to Google Maps, Google will automatically display your local ad based on customer searches in proximity to your location, and when a user hits ‘explore near me’. Display ads and YouTube ads will show when a user is most likely to click on your ad, so this heavily relies on Google’s algorithm to drive the best quality of clicks with the goal of that user making their way to your client’s business.

This is a perfect way to increase the number of physical store visits while leveraging automation and not having to focus on curating keyword lists and testing ad copy.

3. Local Inventory Ads – promote local store inventory (Google Merchant Center required)

UX in the digital age is becoming more and more of a priority for digital advertisers, as requiring multiple pageviews or clicks from the consumer will often just not cut it. Google’s feature updated for Local Inventory Ads provides a single-page, seamless shopping experience for users viewing your products locally.

If your client is a retailer and has a shopping feed, you can enable local inventory ads. This will allow you to show products your client has in stock at locations near to the searcher. Furthermore, users can view the product details, reviews and your location details all on the Google browser. So there’s no need to worry about mapping users from the correct product ad or even from your client’s homepage to a product.

If you’re looking to set your client’s business apart from their competitors, enabling Local Inventory Ads and allowing for a Google store front to showcase your products in real-time with stock and the exact distance to their location will certainly do so. This will help drive local store traffic and in-store sales. Google has a local inventory ad implementation guide to help take your client’s typical merchant center feed and turn it into an in-store sale ad.

Closing Thoughts

There are multiple ways to make Google Ads work for your client’s business in 2019. If you’re looking to drive qualified leads from a website, then look to enhance local search volume with location-based keywords and expanded geographic targeting, or test new location settings.

To increase local store traffic to your client’s business you must try Google local campaigns where the main objective is store visits. Leverage the automation Google has provided to drive low-cost store visits to your client’s business, especially with the cross-channel targeting on all Google platforms.

Finally, if your client is a retailer and has a shopping feed, or is putting one together, be sure to leverage local inventory ads. Today, users want a seamless experience, and if they can find your client’s product first, and don’t need to leave the browser to find it, bingo, you’re now driving local foot traffic and sales by adding local ads to your shopping campaigns.

As you’ll no doubt be aware, local targeting is essential for almost every business on some level. Here I’ll be sharing my tips on how to get hyperlocal with your targeting, but rather than focusing on SEO, I’ll be looking at broader themes of building a local brand and generating sales locally. Of course, SEO slots nicely into the mix of channels, so I’ve added details on how each tactic benefits SEO where it’s applicable.

I’ll be focusing on two areas:

1. Local brand-building
2. Local sales and leads

Without further delay, let’s get stuck in…

Local Brand-building

1. Local Events

Local events can be attended and/or sponsored. I’ll get into sponsorship a little later, so let’s focus on attending, exhibiting, and speaking at events.

Firstly you have the tried-and-tested corporate events. Conferences, seminars, workshops, roadshows, meetups, networking groups, and everything in between. These are most suited to B2B. The challenge here is to have the time and energy to offer your physical presence. These local events present key, grass-root opportunities to make contacts and build brand relationships in the immediate area.

Secondly, let’s think outside the box. Events needn’t relate directly to your industry. They can be “serious”, such as local Chamber of Commerce meetings, or more relaxed events such as art exhibitions, restaurant openings, and the like. Granted, the scope for SEO value is limited in these circumstances, but building local relationships will open future marketing opportunities.

SEO benefit: Backlinks from event listings are a useful side effect. Try to support others to publish roundups and reviews of their event experience. Get yourself featured and linked.

2. Local Influencers and Stakeholders

Influencer marketing isn’t only the domain of big brands with bottomless pockets. There are other ways to use an influencer-focused approach, without paying millions for Kim Kardashian to post a hashtag. Instead, why not build local influencer collaboration into content creation itself?

In practice, the process would look like this:

1. Build a database of local influencers who have respect among your audience
2. Plan a content calendar with these stakeholders in mind
3. Reach out for comments, quotes, and value-add input in varying forms
4. Employ a content distribution strategy to achieve maximum reach

This might take the form of curated content or deeper features; in written or visual formats.

For example, let’s say that your business offers ski insurance in the US…

You might wish to interview ten of the most established instructors about their favorite “apres ski” bars in a given resort. For a deeper story, you might interview the mayor about how a specific ski resort has changed over recent times. Both options will have relevant local impact.

SEO benefit: Traffic and engagement are proven ranking factors, and so a bigger reach is likely to yield better search performance. Over time, this will result in more backlinks and will solidify the content’s position. You can also request that contributors promote the content on their own website(s), thus generating a source of high-quality local links.

3. Local Sponsorship

As Claudia Cruz at Moz clearly argues in her comprehensive guide to local sponsorships:

“Local sponsorships remain the most-overlooked and opportunity-rich channel, and they build real local connections for both large brands and small business alike.”

There are many influential areas to focus sponsorship: local nonprofits, events, sports clubs, blogs,  websites, and networking groups. Again, you must be comfortable with a somewhat unclear return on investment, as this is primarily a brand-building exercise.

Here are some important tips for local sponsorship:

• Align values and mission; don’t just sponsor for the sake of it
• Acknowledge fellow sponsors and breed a collaborative mindset
• Maintain a local focus in copy and communication with partners
• Sponsorships don’t necessarily need to be monetary
• Be patient with local partners, as they may not be used to having sponsorships
• Consider year-round sponsorship deals with venues

SEO benefit: Primarily, this will give link-building benefits. As part of any sponsorship, try to ensure that the recipient creates dofollow backlinks from their online platforms. As InsideLocal webinar panelists noted:

“Links can add a lot of location relevance. By joining the local Chamber of Commerce, the Better Business Bureau, sponsoring local events and local non-profits, and getting mentioned in the local media, you can boost your relevance for that particular location.”

Local Leads and Sales

4. Hyperlocal Google Ads

Done well, Google Ads can be the fastest route to immediate leads and sales, locally or otherwise.

If you’re only SEO-focused, perhaps the PPC team will have this covered. If not, do give them a nudge. If your digital oversight stretches across organic and paid channels, hyperlocal Google Ads are worthy of your attention.

Tom Waddington’s guide to Google Local Service Ads is a must-read for this topic, and so is the detailed BrightLocal Click Study. LSAs are a key tool in the kit of local search marketers.

There are other ways to target local audiences using Google Ads, already covered by BrightLocal over the years. Here are some articles worthy of further reading:

• How to Build Local PPC Campaigns That Really Deliver New Customers (Liam Wade)
• How effective is Google AdWords Express for Local Businesses? (Myles Anderson)

5. Paid Social Media

Targeting sponsored social content to local audiences is remarkably cheap. Unsurprisingly, Facebook leads the way for paid social ads, and even launched a local awareness ad option for businesses.

Regardless of platform, here are some key principles to follow for local social advertising:

• Use local references in the copy
• Use local imagery (the more specific and recognizable the better)
• Consider using local language and/or slang, provided it isn’t disingenuous

It’s important that when using the paid approach to trying to generate local, top-of-funnel leads through things like email or webinar signups, the landing page content matches your local emphasis. Any dislocation in the message will create drop-off from the ad set to the point of conversion.

All of the main social advertising networks allow you to target by geo-location, and by definition this means you can target local audiences easily. If you’re selling products, create a compelling value proposition or special offer for the promotion.

6. Local partnerships

Who else is working within your niche in the local area?

The most obvious case study here is the wedding industry. Any wedding has a relatively predictable set of moving parts: the venue, the caterer, the live band, the photographer, and the DJ. This allows referral partnerships to operate within the ecosystem, with stakeholders passing leads onto each other and operating in partnership.

Can you spot a similar pattern for your niche?

If so, bear the following advice in mind:

• Research potential partners carefully and approach strategically
• Prove yourself and provide value before a referral partnership
• Personal relationships matter!
• Offer meaningful collaboration and support
• Don’t focus narrowly on revenue
• Agree on an ideal referral process, but remain flexible

Don’t think about “referral sources”; it’s a two-way street, so you need to pair up for referral partnerships that create mutually beneficial outcomes.

Summary

Local business marketing is always a long game to play, but don’t ignore the quick wins in the meantime.

Building the brand on a local level takes time, and it’s certainly a more manual and organic process. Whether you aim to grow to into national and international markets, or whether you are already there and want to consolidate local markets, this level of brand-building is key.

Paid channels are an immediate route to market, no matter how big or small that market is. Through hyperlocal Google Ads and sponsored social, audiences can be targeted in specific locations better than ever. But relationships are still key to generating local sales, from nurturing top-of-funnel contacts to working closely with referral partners in your local area.

The ability to add photos to a Local Services ad started back in June 2018. At the time it was limited to photographers and event planners and the photos only showed on the full profile of the business. The full profile would be what you see after clicking on their Local Services ad.

Keep in mind that Local Services ads are pay-per-lead, not pay-per-click, so a business is not charged when you click through to view their full Local Services profile. They are only charged if you call them, or if you message them (which is only an option for some categories). Near the end of July 2018, Google appeared to expand the ability to add photos to businesses in all Local Services ads categories.

Now, at the beginning of 2019, photos have started to appear on Local Services ads on the initial search result, but only for photographers and event planners, and only on desktop:

It’s unknown yet if they’ll expand this approach to categories besides photographers and event planners, but as always with Google, it could very well suggest a new direction for this kind of ad. While I wouldn’t think they would take this approach for plumbers, locksmiths and other service categories, I wouldn’t be surprised if they at least test it in a few other markets.

Either way, it’s important for businesses to take advantage of the ability to add photos to their Local Services ad, even if it will only be seen on their full profile view.

How to Manage Photos in Local Services Ads

Within the Local Services dashboard you should see a Photos box on the Profile and Budget section. From there you will be able to upload images. Bear in mind that photos from Google My Business are not automatically populated in Local Services, so you will need to add them here even if you already have photos uploaded there.

There are, of course, guidelines that must be followed to help ensure the photos will appear on your profile.

• Acceptable file types are: JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, ICO, and WEBP (max. photo size 10MB)
• Resolution needs to be at least 640 x 640 for all photo sections except ‘Cover’. The Cover photo (the image that appears in the ad) needs to be at least 1440 x 810 with an aspect ratio of 16:9
• You must own the copyright for the images and the image content needs to be related to your business
• Photos should be high quality, not have frames, borders, transparent backgrounds or be collages. Text overlays are not supposed to be accepted but I have seen them on listings.

The main reason I have seen for photos getting denied is due to a phone number being added to or overlaid onto the photo. If the phone number is in the photo and not very prominent (on a truck or sign in the background, for example) then it might get accepted, but if the number stands out and Google thinks a user may just call that number instead of the tracking phone number Google provides on the Local Services ad itself, the photo will likely be denied.

It’s important to take the time to assemble and upload quality photos to your Google Local Service ads. The ability to customize these ads overall is very limited, but you need to take advantage of any opportunities given to help your or your clients’ business stand out from the competition in this potentially very lucrative space.

A service area business (or SAB) is any business that provides services and products at the location of their customers. One question often asked about these types of businesses is how they go about allowing people in their wide service area find them on Google. Well, they simply create a Google My Business listing, specify their service area in the Google My Business dashboard, and they’re good to go, right?

No, not at all. If only it were that simple.

Service Area Businesses and Google My Business in 2019

For the most part, the main benefit of setting your service area in Google My Business was always to generate a visual representation so users could quickly determine if you served their area or not. But with recent changes in the works for service area business in Google My Business, (some of those are confirmed, some are speculation), I wonder if that visual representation of the service area on a listing might eventually go away.

The ability to specify a service area by city as opposed to just setting a radius isn’t new, but not being able to specify by radius is. The reason I wonder if the map representation of a business’ service area will eventually go away is because I see some similarities here with Google Local Services ads.

When setting up a Local Services ad (LSA) profile, a business specifies their service area by entering cities and then drilling down to zip/postal codes. While a visual representation of the service area exists within the LSA dashboard, it does not appear on the actual listing that users see—it simply shows a list of the cities the business specified they serve.

Another reason I wonder about the survival of service area map is because I haven’t forgotten the time that Google temporarily decided to take service area business listings out of local and move them to the free section of the Local Services ads finder (note: back then, Local Services was called Home Services). I don’t necessarily think they’re going to do that again but it’s hard for me to ignore some of the similarities I’m seeing.

Speculating on what Google might do can be fun (and scary), but we need to focus on how local currently operates or service-area businesses. We know that relevance, proximity and prominence are the primary factors Google uses for determining local results, in a lot of cases it seems that distance (proximity) is given too much weight.

For example, someone looking for a roofer, plumber, pest control company, or some other type of SAB that will come to their location is likely to want to find the best company that serves their location, not just one that is right around the corner. Plus, a business that happens to be close by won’t necessarily be able to serve them any faster than one that’s further away.

However, this is by the by. As long as distance continues to be a top ranking factor in the Google Local Finder, businesses are left to find ways to improve their visibility in the search results to reach potential customers in their entire service area.

Can your Service Area Business rank for cities it’s not located in?

In some situations, it is possible for a business to appear in the local pack in cities other than the one they’re located in, particularly in geographical areas where city footprints and populations are small (this also typically paired with less competition in the same city). A business has a much better chance when that is the case.

However, in cities with huge footprints, large populations and a lot of competing businesses, SABs have comparatively little chance of appearing in the local pack for cities other than the one they’re located in. There are, of course, many other factors that come into play here but the point is to understand the situation specific to the business, so that expectations can be set accordingly and that your time and effort can be spent wisely.

Google My Business Tactics for Service Area Businesses

Assuming you have the basics in place and are keeping up with all the ongoing changes and features that have been added to Google My Business and Maps, what else can you do?

Check out the competition

Not just to see what they’re doing, but to see if their GMB listings are even eligible. Spam on Maps is so bad in so many verticals that it’s impossible to ignore.

Some of it is so obvious it’s sad, while others take a little more time and digging to uncover. I have seen so many ineligible listings and fake reviews that I wonder if Google has any idea how bad it is.

Some people (usually spammers) might tell you to ‘mind your own business’, ‘just focus on your client’ and ‘stop worry about what they’re doing’. Well, getting rid of ineligible listings on Maps that shouldn’t exist is focusing on helping your client!

For way too long, I basically ignored spam in Maps. At the time I didn’t know if I could do anything about it and I assumed Google would take the listings down eventually anyway. But I later realized that Google isn’t really doing anything about the problem and so the responsibility falls to me or someone like me to do something about it: report them on the Google My Business forum. You can also reach out to GMB support via Twitter or Facebook.

How bad can it be?

Bad enough that’s it’s one of the first things I do when working with a new client. I recently started working with one and began checking out the local results in their immediate area. For one main keyword, the results included:

1. A lead generation listing created by an agency that’s known to spam Maps (how do you like that palindrome?) on a massive scale
2. A legitimate business but one that wasn’t actually in the stated location. It was a second listing they created at a house about 20 minutes away from the actual business location. The business name was also stuffed with keywords, which helped them rank well erroneously since it was the keyword I was checking.
3. My new client’s listing
4. A legitimate business using an ineligible listing (they have 15 GMB listings in the area, with most of them set as service area business listings for the cities they serve)
5. A legit business with an eligible listing!

There are several more lead generation and other ineligible listings present, particularly after the first ten results. While it’s depressing that there’s so much spam in their area, it’s not surprising, and reporting the ineligible listings will likely cause some quick wins.

After checking out the city where the business is physically located, expand out and check some of the nearby cities that are also in the service area. You can manually check rankings for several keywords utilizing AdWords Preview Tool and a location-emulating extension to help get a better idea of the landscape.

Next create a spreadsheet and note all of the listings you want to investigate. Asking your client about the various businesses in the area is also helpful. They’ll often know who is real and who isn’t. And they’ll want to know why a business they’ve never heard of (located at a mailbox rental store or some other fake address) is outranking them.

A few GMB reporting Do’s and Don’ts

• Do: read (and try to understand) the Google My Business guidelines
• Do: create a document with questionable listings to look into
• Don’t:  try to report listings without doing thorough research on them
• Don’t: assume that a listing that seems like obvious spam to you will be removed by Google at quick glance. When reporting a listing in the GMB forum, provide reasons why the listing is ineligible. Be thorough.

Get Beyond (and Below) the Map with City Pages

Creating website pages for cities within the service area of a business can be an effective tactic to obtain visibility in the search results, particularly when the chances of appearing in the local pack results are often slim due to distance.

This is a tactic that has been utilized by many for a long time, but I find that it’s often not executed well. Duplicated content, an obvious lack of keyword research, poor schema markup implementation, and page neglect are common issues I see.

A few city page Do’s and Don’ts

• Do: determine priorities within the service area of the business. Which areas are most important to the business? Which do they want to work in the most? Make note of the population for the cities in their service area
• Do: keyword research. Try to understand how consumers are searching for services and the products the business provides so you know what exactly you need to target
• Do: create unique content for each page. No, it’s not easy, but it is necessary!
• Do: look at the search results to see how the results for the pages appear in desktop and mobile results
• Don’t: use the same content but with swapped-out city name and just a few other words changed
• Don’t: merely rely on a third-party review system to generate all or most of the content for these pages
• Don’t: create the pages and never look at them again
• Don’t: create pages for every single city and keyword you’re targeting

Help Your Pages Stand Out in Search Results

Utilizing schema review markup to generate a review snippet in the search results is another tactic that has been around a long time, and a lot of businesses are doing it, particularly on city pages. Having the stars and rating appear with your search result is a great way to increase visibility and CTR, but it’s not as effective when nearly every other organic search result has it as well. So you need another differentiator…

Mobile image thumbnails are another way to help your pages stand out more in the search results, although they are trickier and of course are only seen on mobile. These have been appearing in mobile search results for local businesses for quite a while but seem to have grown in prominence and exposure over the past few months.

One benefit they have over review snippets is that they can appear for a homepage result. They can be a little difficult to control, however, and as Mike Blumenthal points out, it’s all about the context.

Since Google is grabbing and cropping images to show here, some interesting and less than ideal results can occur:

In this example, the business has a thumbnail result for their homepage, which is great. The problem is that due to Google cropping their logo, it looks like their name is Dope Plumbing. (I guess whether that is a positive or negative will vary from one person to the next!) For the record, their business name is actually Cooper Plumbing.

Google is cropping these images to generate a square thumbnail, and the crop isn’t always centered, so you may be surprised at what you see if you do get one to appear in the search results. With that in mind, it’s best to start with a square image and place it in the main content area of the page. Ideally you’ll choose something that makes sense for a person viewing the page, but due to these mobile thumbnail results, you will want to be mindful of how your page will appear in the search results.

If the company is well-branded, trying to get their logo in the results can be a good way to go. If it’s a smaller company that doesn’t have much name recognition, an image that highlights a reason to choose them over a well-known competitor may be a better option.

In this example, the thumbnail, while not really a great looking graphic, stands out and may entice a consumer more than their company logo would:

While mobile image thumbnails can appear on any page, city pages can be good candidates for testing them. Keep in mind that these thumbnails are more of a moving target than review snippets. Also, be aware that review snippets and mobile image thumbnails can appear at the same time for the same result (for an extra visual bonus), and the mobile image thumbnail may appear for some search queries but not others. Again, it’s all about the context.

Using Paid Search to Reach Customers in your Service Area

You didn’t think you were going to get the visibility you desire without paying Google, did you?

Google Ads

You might not be able to get the results you’d like through visibility in organic search results alone. If you don’t already have a Google Ads campaign in place, you will likely need to create one in order to reach potential customers throughout your service area. Another benefit is that you can mine data from your Google Ads campaign for beneficial insights that can help shape priorities on the organic side.

Google Local Services Ads

If Google Local Services ads are available in your area for your business type (check this post to find out), you need to give them a shot. Like local results, distance is a significant factor in rankings. Depending on the competition, you may not be able to obtain great visibility in Local Services ads for potential customers that are within the service area but not close to the physical location of the business.

Either way, these ads get prime placement and cost per lead is typically very reasonable, so they can’t be ignored.

If you’re working with a client where LSAs are applicable, read up on them and offer to help them with it. You could use data from this BrightLocal study to show how often they’re clicked, too.

We recently started working with a client in an established LSA market. We asked why they weren’t in the LSAs and if the agency they worked with had talked to them about these ads. They had. They told them it was a waste of time and not to bother with it. What a terrible thing to say! (Perhaps the agency doesn’t know much about LSA or feels threatened by them because the lead costs are better than what they were getting with their Google Ads campaign?)

Regardless, I urge you not to shield clients from products that can be beneficial to them. Be on their side and help them navigate all of the changes Google is throwing their way. Your clients will appreciate it and will value having you around much more if you do so.

• What impact does the appearance of LSAs have on consumers’ click behavior
• What drives people’s decisions to click where they do?

To do this, we enlisted more than 5,500 impartial internet users to help us find out how the emergence of Local Services ads impacts the way consumers use and choose local businesses in Google search results.

We directed even splits of testers to SERPs resulting from the following SAB-based search terms (half with and half without LSAs, and all based in the same location):

• “garage door contractors san francisco”
• “house painting san francisco
• “locksmiths san francisco”
• “plumbers san francisco”
• “towing companies san francisco”

If you’d like to find out more on the methodology, click here.

Throughout the study, SAB and LSA expert Tom Waddington has provided his insights into what the findings show. A huge thanks to Tom for his excellent explanations! To stay up to date on the latest on Local Services ads, be sure to follow Tom on Twitter.

How Do Google’s Local Services Ads Affect SERP Click-through?

Local Services ads were only shown to half of the testers.

The Proportion of Clicks by SERP Result Type

To see the full SERP heatmap, click on the above image. This heatmap shows the average across the ten tests, grouped by the type of click. You can view the individual SERP results heatmaps in the appendix below. 

Key Findings

• The presence of Local Services ads affects the number of clicks for all other SERP types.
• When LSAs are present, 25.3% of all clicks are on paid results. When LSAs are absent, this is 14.6% – a difference of 10.7%.
• Organic results receive the most clicks of all SERP types, though they see a drop of 6.8% when LSAs are present.
• When LSAs are present, 55.8% of clicks are before organic results. For non-LSA SERPs, this is 48.7%.
• The local pack is the second most clicked-on SERP type, followed by PPC adverts appearing at the top of the page.
• PPC ads at the bottom of the page receive only a tiny proportion of clicks.