It may appear as if the counsel below is solely for those in real estate, there is application in other places. There are 2 crowds of people on the hunt for your business.



1.Someone who resides in your locale - your city or state - who may search for "real estate", "dentist", "churches", or "restaurant" and the results he desires to see are only from the area he lives in. When he comes looking; there you will be.

2.A person may not be in your area at all (or else Google's system can't tell where he is), but is still asking for your area's services. He goes to Google and types in "movers in Palo Alto," "Palo Alto real estate," or "hotels Palo Alto," hoping to get Palo-Alto-only results. He may be traveling on holiday; he may be planning a move; he may be an investor.

Truth be told he could reside in Palo Alto, however he might at the moment be in Los Angeles, Chicago, Edmonton, Perth, or Saigon, but he is still looking on Google for you and he pin points Palo Alto by name.

One way or the other when he comes calling, you are there, ready to answer.

Reaching The First Person

With your target being a double target of these two classes of people you need to make not one but two Google campaigns. This is the way. In the set up phase of your campaign choose "regional targeting".

Next choose the country, then state or province, then city or cluster of cities.

Reaching The Second Person

If you were advertising for real estate in California, you'd set up a nationwide campaign, possibly even an international campaign, but with local terms like "Visalia real estate" and "Yorba Linda real estate." After all, there are likely to be people from all over the country, and maybe even outside the country, who are doing searches on these terms.

Take a map or a list of cities off of a website and make a keyword list similar to this:

California real estate

LA real estate

Los Angeles real estate

Villa Real real estate

Santa Monica real estate

Buy a home in Eureka

Buy a home in Santa Barbara

Purchase homes in Coronado

Buy homes Sausalito

By using the keyword list from the regional campaign (that is a general list) and, with a spreadsheet, combining it (in a mix and match fashion) with a list of cities or towns, you can produce a long, quick keyword campaign.

Either way, you'll end up with a huge keyword list: 95 percent of them will never get searches, and the other 5 percent may only get a few. However, it doesn't cost anything to bid on these keywords if nobody clicks, and when people do click, they'll only be five or ten cents. Not much traffic, but what you do get will be bargain priced. You should still buy generic keywords in your local campaign, but these local keywords in a nationwide campaign will bring very cheap clicks, mostly.

Your AdWords account for real estate could be organized thusly:

Campaign #1: California Targeting Only Group 1: Real estate Group 2: Buy homes

Campaign #2: National Targeting-entire USA Group 1: California real estate Group 2: Buy homes California

Now you have both bases covered, and you'll be getting as much traffic as possible for your local market. The key is that you're not leaving out people in other geographic locations who are seriously looking for what you offer.

You can also use your business's address or latitude and longitude, and target all searches within a radius that you select. Google even gives you the advanced option of choosing your own customized set of coordinates that you want to target.

Hone Your Chops On A Local Test Campaign Before You Go National

An age-old advertising practice is to test ideas in a smaller market before you spend big bucks to try them out in a larger one. Nowadays, the risks of going national instantly if you have a good product may seem small because after all, you're paying for one click at a time, you can set a daily budget, and you can turn your traffic on and off at will. But that doesn't undo the value of trying your product in one small geographic area first

For example, if you sell advice to investors, you might start just with investors in New York State. The advantage? You don't need to worry nearly as much about your daily budget. If your cash reserves are limited, you can choose this smaller market to start off in, and if in the first few weeks or months it's not profitable, you're not forced to shut the entire thing down for fear of quickly going bankrupt. Make the sales process profitable in a smaller market, and then go national.

At that point, you're able to take on the big boys in the worldwide market because you know that the mechanism works like clockwork in the small market, and every dollar you send out comes back with more dollars attached. Oh, this is also an excellent way to keep competitors from knowing what you're up to, if they don't live in the cities you're targeting.