Why have a local search strategy? Mark Taylor, CEO of eSales Hub, takes you through a video on the five reasons why he believes you need a local search strategy.
Video Transcription
Hi and welcome to another eSales Hub video.
Now this week I’ve decided to feature something which we regularly get asked
Why have a local search strategy in the first place?
I was actually MTEX last week which is pretty big show in London the excel for a couple of days and we had Google come along and speak on our behalf .
Digantika Mitra came and spoke on our behalf who’s our relationship manager at Google
and one of the questions we had from the audience is “I’m running PPC on broad match, so why don’t we need to do local search strategy, because surely I’m hoovering up all the available search by having a good strategy.
Well I thought that was a really interesting topic for debate which is why I’ve produced this video.
So I’m gonna give you the five reasons why I think local search should be in your strategy whether your ecommerce or whether you’re a local service provider. We’re gonna give you
the five reasons why.
I’m gonna delve right into some stats straightaway.
So the first thing is when you go into your Google AdWords account you’ll be able to find on your interface impressions.
Now I am yet to see a client or a company that has got a hundred-percent impression share. Now what does impression show mean? It’s a good question. Impression share is the amount of times that your ad gets served, so not necessarily clicked but served to the amount of searches that are actually in your keyword group.
So for example we’ve got an estate agency client and they don’t cover the whole of the UK but they cover some parts of it and they get about a 32% impression share nationally. Now if you’re running a national campaign and you’re covering the whole of the UK the chances are your impression share is going to be pretty low and you know again it is almost practically impossible to get hundred percent an impression share.
So what a local strategy enables you to do is to grow that impression share in certain markets. What I mean by this is certain markets certain geographically, like locations so you can actually get your ad outs to more relevant searches or more relevant people that are searching for your product and therefore increase your impression share.
So it’s a really handy tool – its a real handy way to actually improving your impression share
Now what are the other things that make local search relevant to you strategy?
The big thing is that high Google click through rate on is based on relevancy of your ad so obviously as you know the highermrelevancy of your your ad, your google ad, on AdWords in theory the higher the click-through rate you’re gonna get.
Why is that important?
Well the more people to click on your ad the more people that will get your website and therefore hopefully the more people that you will actually convert if you have a good quality landing page for them to go to.
Now how do you make your ads as relevant as you possible?
Can location is actually one of the ways that you can make it more relevant and increase those click-through rates?
Again when I look at what Google is trying to do is what’s the one hook that Google are trying to do is they’re trying to find out your location resent you ads that are more relevant to you through where you’re located.
Google have invested billions of pounds in developing this technology, why not use it to your benefit to generate more leads, or more sales, or more ecommerce transactions and therefore by making your ads very, very relevant to the location of the searcher you can get really, really good click-through rates.
When you look at word stream they do some really, really good industry benchmarks and I would say from what we can see from our click-through rates with our clients by using a localized strategy we’ve pretty much double to three times greater in our click-through rate than some of the word stream nexamples that given in the benchmarking.
So it definitely helps your click-through rate and grow that click-through rate if using a localized strategy.
A third reason is greater accuracy of how ads are server. Now one of the questions I got
asked last week was “I run an e-commerce store, I’m selling clothes, so why do we need a location strategy?”
Well believe it or not this is, its crazy to imagine, but there’s different weather in the UK so yeah it is a bit more chilly in Scotland compared to Cornwall, and the weather is very, very different .
If you do some analysis on you’re the sales of your website you will find different pockets of locations that respond differently. Whether it be two brands, whether it be to the actual products themselves to type of garments that they want to buy. By having a localized strategy, even if you’re an e-commerce provider, it enables you again to produce a more relevant campaign which means that you can drive traffic potentially at a much cheaper rate by targeting specifically garments or items that more relevant to where they’re located.
We had another example because we where the client a few years ago there was a heating client. They had service here in Scotland and also in Southampton and they couldn’t get their
heads around you know why is it that Scotland’s doing so well for heating repairs and Southampton. When we checked the temperature it was literally a 15 degree difference in temperature that week between Southampton and Scotland. Winter had hit Scotland it hadn’t hit Southampton yet and that’s what they were seeing almost four or five times the rate of enquiries coming through up in Scotland.
Now again without geo-targeting Scotland I probably never would have seen it able to be able to take advantage of that early winter that hit a few years ago.
So it’s definitely want to consider the fourth reason is higher converting sales now Google’s done some research on this. What the research suggests is that by localizing your content and targeting local search you’re gonna get double the amount of sales conversions.
We think it’s potentially higher than that. We’ve got some clients that convert around 70% which probably sounds a bit crazy but some of them or emergency-led. So the more considered purchases that we drive leads for have a conversion between 40 50 percent. Yet you know you talking about an e-commerce site you’ll be very, very lucky to get you know between seven and ten percent conversion
So what local search enables you to do is to really almost like laser sight those customers and they’re very, very high converting. So you know over time what you’ll start to see is you’ll be able to tell your message specific different areas and generate those high converting sales.
So but what does this nall mean and really that’s where I come to my fifth reason is it’s all about reducing your cost of sales.
So if you can get a higher click-through rate, a better impression share you know you’re
targeting people with a more relevant message which leads to higher converting sales, then you’re gonna reduce your cost per sale and this isn’t really an old trick.
You know Yellow Pages was around for years. I remember when I was at Nationwide Autocenters, Yellow Pages used to drive about 30 to 40 percent of our business it was really, really cheap. Unfortunately you know, the directories lost their ability to drive traffic and you know all of local search essentially moved online onto Google. But back in a day, it was still a really good source of business. And that’s exactly what we see with local search is a lot of our clients find that they join it together with their the national search. They’re looking at the brand terms they’re kind of more generic key terms. But local search enables them to lower their cost per sale because it’s slightly cheaper – they get a high click-through rate that’s much higher converting, bringing down their with cost per sale. It might only be by a few points but it certainly makes a big difference to quite a few of our clients
So that’s the five reasons why we believe that you should include local search within your strategy. As always please leave your comments below this video and if you have any questions do get in contact. Thanks very much for watching.
