As a home services company, location-based marketing and advertising is the key to unlocking more leads. Our own research has found that tailoring messages to relevant audiences within your service area(s) will not only save you thousands of dollars in worthless clicks, it can drop your cost-per-lead by over 15 percent as well. By leveraging the robust set of tools Google AdWords provides, you can target your paid search ads toward the exact geographic locations where the greatest opportunities are present. For your benefit, we’ve put together a few quick tips to help you geotarget your paid search ads more effectively.

1) Start with Your Service Area 

For starters, you only want to serve ads to folks who live in or near your area(s) of operation. An easy way to do this is by leveraging the Radius targeting tool in AdWords. To see the best results, we suggest you don’t advertise past a 60-mile radius from your headquarters. Also, try not to target too small of an area because it might not meet the targeting criteria of AdWords, causing your ads to show intermittently or not be shown at all. 

2) Exclude Irrelevant or Undesired Audiences

Although you’ve set your radius, your ads may still be showing in irrelevant locations. To put an end to this, use the Location exclusion tool to make negative geographic targets out of the counties, states and regions where you don’t want your ads to appear. You can even block undesired locations within your radius. For example, if you operate near a big city but prefer to stay out of it, negatively target it to make your messages disappear from its residents. When all is said and done, your ads will only be visible in the areas you want to build leads in.

3) Separate Your Targeted Radius and Compare

To compare which sections of your target radius convert the best, break it up into separate location ranges (0-15 miles, 15-30 miles, 30-45 miles etc.). Your ads will serve to anyone searching for your keywords in any of these ranges. Try this for a month and see which range yields the highest conversion rate. After analyzing your results, bid aggressively on keywords in the highest-converting group and wait for your phones to ring and the quote forms to flow in. One of our own clients tried this and increased their conversion rate by 19 percent while reducing their cost-per-lead by 15 percent. 

Interested in learning more paid search hacks? Our eBook on the subject is chocked full of them. Download it today and start maximizing the ROI of your paid search efforts.