Google Ads for Local Service Business WITH A small BUDGET

August 2022 is the month that if you have any local campaigns in your Google Ads account, that they will be automatically upgraded to Performance Max campaigns. But right now, my very strong recommendation is that if you've got a local business that you want to advertise through Google Ads, you should be focusing on one type of campaign and one campaign only, and that is search campaigns. And the reason for that is because search campaigns give you a lot more control over the important optimization actions of LOC targeting, keyword targeting, your ad copy, and audience targeting. Plus, on top of that, search campaigns give you so much more data than what Performance Max campaigns currently do, so that you can then analyze that data and then make the more strategic decisions so that you can continue to get the highest level of conversions at the lowest cost for your business and achieving all of that for the lowest spend possible. In fact, I've always found that local businesses get far better results using a combination of search or search and display versus local campaigns. So in this video, I'm going to show you exactly what you need to focus on if you want success with the Google Ads campaign as a local business owner. But just in case we haven't met yet, my name is Aaron Young, and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads master. And I've been creating profitable Google Ads campaigns for local businesses since 2010. And one of the greatest tools that I use to optimize all of my own campaigns is my Google Ads Optimization checklist. And this is a checklist which lets you know exactly what you need to be optimizing in your Google Ads account every 72 hours, every week, every month, and every 90 days. And if you would like to get a free copy of the Google Ads Optimization checklist that I use even now, all you need to do is to follow the link in the description below. Okay, so let's get straight into today's teaching. Now, when it comes to optimizing your Google Ads campaign, as a local business owner, you need to remember that there are four key ways in which you can optimize your campaign. Four key ways are the locations that you target, the keywords that you target, the audiences that you target, and then finally, the hour of the day and the day of week that you are running your ads. And then on top of all of those four items, we then move to the next stage, which is where we're trying to find the best messages, headlines, and ad copy that generate the highest level of conversions. But let's now start with that first important element, which is your location. Targeting. Now, when it comes to location targeting, I recommend that you first start by only targeting people who are looking for your services who actually live or regularly in your local area. And then once you have some more data, you can then expand out your location targeting to also include people who are outside of your area but are looking for your services in your actual area. So when you're in the campaign area for your Google Ads account, you need to go into settings, and then when you're in settings, go into your location area and then scroll down to this section of location options. And the option that you want to select for your local business campaign is this second option, which is the presence. And this is focusing on people who are in or regularly in your targeted areas. Now, as I said previously, once you have enough data, if you wanted to, you could also include this presence or interest. But usually for local businesses, I will still keep it at presence only. And the reason for that is because with a local business campaign, we want to focus on people who are in or regularly in your targeted areas. And then when you go through to actually add in these targeted areas, you can do two options. You can do it by cities or postcodes, or you can actually enter in this kilometer radius. And to do that you need to go into Advanced Search. And then when you're in Advanced Search, go to Radius and then you can actually add in your business name. Or if you've already got your business profile linked, you can just select this option here and then you can just select the radius that you wanted to add in. So if you wanted to add in 20 miles or 20 kilometers, you just add that in through here and press Save. So now that you've got your Google Ads campaign optimized for the correct location, you then want to focus on your keywords and to make sure that your ads are triggering for the correct keywords, which are going to be giving you the highest level of conversions for your business. What you need to do is you need to make sure that you are completing a search term audit every 72 hours. And if you don't know how to complete a search term audit, what you need to do is you need to go to keywords and, and then view the actual search terms. And what this does is this actually brings up a full list of all of the keywords which have triggered your ads. And then from there we can do two things. Firstly, we can add in some extra negative keywords to stop your ads, triggering for those search terms in future searches, or if you do see some search terms which you're currently not targeting in your Google Ads campaign, you can actually then go in and add them as an extra keyword so that you can generate further searches for that profitable keyword theme. And let me now show you some three core keyword themes that you should be looking to exclude for your local business campaign. So to get to this section where you're actually seeing the search terms which have triggered your ads, you want to go into keywords and then go down into the Search Terms section. I just want to show you the history of some of the keyword searches that I've actually excluded. And the first one that you want to be looking out for is when someone has searched for your service but for an area which is outside of your targeted area. So in this campaign it's all about Skip Bins and Skip Higher and we've actually excluded these two. And the reason for that is because both of these search terms include suburbs or towns which are outside of this business's targeted area. So in here we've got Forest Lake and in this one we've got Bendigo. And what's happened here is someone has actually completed the search term for Skip Bin and they are actually located in our targeted area, but they're searching for a service which is outside of our targeted area. And with the new level of keyword targeting, which Google changed last year, is that even though we're not targeting these keywords, it's still actually appearing in a phrase match. So this is why you do need to actually go through and make sure you're excluding these other location areas. And the second one that you need to be looking for, which I would generally exclude, is for searches for a competitor's brand name. And that's why I've excluded this one like a one Skip Higher Action, Skip Higher and also Aussie Skip Bins. And the reason for that is because if I did want to target and my competitive competitors names, I would actually go through and set up a separate competitor campaign. And the reason for that is because our quality score is going to be lower and the costs are going to be higher. And given that for a local business, especially when we're starting out in Google Ads, we want to limit our costs. The best option is to actually go through and add in any competitor names as a negative keyword. And then the final one that you want to check is things like this where you're actually seeing Skip Bin business for sale because this user is actually looking to actually buy a Skip business, not actually use our services. So this is another Example, well, we can go in and actually add in this as a negative keyword. So other things you can actually look for are terms like diy, so people who are actually looking at doing something for themselves as opposed to using your service. And now the third area that you need to be optimizing if you want to see success in your Google Ads campaign as a local business owner, is that you want to be collecting as much data as possible and about their audiences in Google that are interacting with your ads. So the goal and the reason for why we add in audiences to your Google search campaigns for local businesses is that you want to be collecting this data as an observation method. And one of the biggest mistakes that I see in Google Ads campaigns, especially for local businesses, is that they only add in one or two different audiences. Because what you need to remember here is that by adding in one or two audiences, that doesn't mean that you are only targeting those audiences because we're using the observation method. It just means that Google is giving you that data. So what you need to see it by adding in audiences to your Google search campaigns, you're actually putting in a manual request to Google requesting that they actually give you that data. So it's kind of like an opt in. If you don't request that data, they won't give it to you. So when you're in the audience sections, you want to go down to this audience segments and then go down to this show table section. And then from here we want to look at the clicks and the impressions in the segment section versus the other section. And what you can see with this campaign is that we've had a total of 363 clicks in our actual campaign and 268 of them have actually come in from added segments. And what the goal is here, the goal is that you want to be above 80%. We're pretty close here in and around about 75%. So to add in that extra audiences, to get that extra data, we just need to go into edit audience segments, we can add it in by campaign, once again, making sure that we're in this observation method. And then we can just actually go through and add in any extra audiences that we want to add. And a good way of doing this is by going into browse, see what their interests and habits are. And for this one, because it's all around home and lifestyle garden, I'll just see if there's anything extra in here that we can add. And because this is a home product, we can actually go through and actually See if there's anything around like TV and movie lovers and music lovers that will actually add in this audience data. And then we go through and add these in. And the reason why I've added those, even though they're not 100% related to this product, which is all about a home improvement service, is because what we are looking at doing is we want to gain a greater profile on who actually clicks and interacts with our ads. Because what we can do from there is that we can then start adding in these bid optimizations or bid adjustments to focus in our budget on the best performing audience groups. And then finally, once we have enough data, we can actually add in some exclusions. So, for example, if you see that there's a certain segment of audiences which have a high spend but no conversions, you can actually add them in as exclusions. And that's something you can't do if you're not actually collecting that data. And that is why it is so important that you add in as many audiences as possible. And now the fourth way that you can optimize your search campaigns for your local business is to go through and add in optimizations by the day of the week and the hour of the day. And what we're looking to do with these optimizations is to actually look and to see where we're actually getting the highest level of performance. And then restrict your ads to only appear on those certain days or hours of the day. Another thing that you can look at here is let's just say, for example, you run a local service business and you only offer your services through Monday to Friday and then maybe for half a day on Saturday, you can restrict the hours that your ads appear in Google so that you are only spending money on your Google Ads campaign. When your business is open to add in an ad schedule for your local business campaign, go down into this Show More feature and then we want to go into ad schedule. And for this campaign, you can already see that we've set up an ad schedule so that our ads only appear on Mondays to Fridays between 7am and 5pm and then on Saturdays between 8am and 12pm for this business. The reason why we set up those restrictions because this campaign is heavily generated by phone calls. And this is the hours that their service is actually open to ring and receive bookings. So there's no point in us actually advertising outside of those areas. But if you did want to change this, you just go through and click on this pencil icon. You can then add in some extra options. So if we wanted to add in some hours for Sunday as well. We could go Sundays and then add in our hours from here, say for example from 10am through to 2pm and then we click save. All four of those optimization actions which I just showed you are part of my Google Ads Optimization checklist. And remember, if you want to get your copy right now, just follow that link in the description earlier in this video I spoke about. Once you've actually completed those four optimization actions, the goal is then to carry out some ad copy split tests so that you can actually find out what are the best performing headlines and descriptions that convert at a higher level in your Google Ads campaign. And if you would like to see the process that I use to carry out proper split testing for your ads, all you need to do is to go through and watch this video right here. Or if you'd like to see how to correctly set up a search campaign for your local business, just go through and watch this video right here. Thanks for joining me. See you next time.