It’s no secret that Google Adwords is a complex beast. It’s big and it really is quite sophisticated. There’s so many ways that it can be used to work for your business, but the trick can be knowing what these are and knowing where to start. If you don’t want to get involved with a marketing company that’s going to set it up for you, then here’s something that you can do for yourself as a local business. And it’s called Google Express. Google Adwords is definitely better than this in terms of the level of sophistication and what it can do, but right now we’re talking about what’s the quick, easy strategy, that you can implement yourself. Something that’s low cost and you can set up with not much hassle….
Getting Started
Google Express will get you in the top of the Google search engine for paid traffic in your geographical area. And we’re going to define our geographical area. So basically all we do is, log into Google Express (or set up a google express account). Just make sure you’re actually in Google Express and not Google Adwords. You’ll be walked through the steps to set up all the info Google needs – about 10 questions relating to your business such as: what’s your website, what’s our business name, what’s your phone number? Where are you physically located? Do do people come to us or do you go out and service them? What geographical area?
Creating Your First Ad
Next step is to effectively write one add. You’ll need to come up with a headline, what you do and the benefits for your customers as the body of the ad. Then you need to tell Google how much a day you’d like to spend on your ads. Google does all the rest, you don’t need to worry about keywords, or what search terms people are turning up for or any of the complexity that comes with setting up Google Adwords. It’s as simple as saying I want to spend $20 a day Max and off you go. This really is the best way to go if you have a small business and you don’t want to engage a marketing team.
Limitations
Because Express is not as complex as Adwords, this simplifies set up but then also a whole lot of features as well.
The main limitation being you can only target one URL or page on your website. So this means you need a REALLY effective homepage or a really effective sales or services page or category page if you choose to send traffic there instead.
If Google Express is the road you’re going to go down first, then make sure your website is up to scratch and your homepage is pretty effective, with clear calls to action, marketing messages, social proof and information about who you are and what you do. I’ve spoken about it in the past but your homepage really needs to meet the 10 second rule and in this case, thats even more critical. Yes, you could send them to your main services page instead of your homepage but this would only be relevant if you didn’t have several services you offer , for example, say you’re an electrician and you had an electrical services page and an emergency electrician page, then you’d need to use your homepage or a category page, if they provide enough quality information.
That is the downside with Express, you do lose that ability to get granular with your advertising in place of ease of set up. But that’s the point, that it’s easy to set up and anyone can really do it, in a matter of minutes.
Making it Work for Mobile Businesses
In terms of the Google business listing, if you offer a mobile service (you don’t actually have one physical location), how can you make that work? You can just tell Google that you service a certain geographical radius, so 40km, 50km ect. And one of Google’s check boxes in the set up says, ‘do they come to you, or do you service them at their location?’. Also, if you work from home and you don’t want them to see your home address, you can tick a box to say, you don’t want to show your business address publicly. So you can still turn up for the geographical location.
Other Benefits
It’s pretty clear Adwords Express is really low cost and really, really easy to set up yourself to target people who are searching for your exact service. The other thing is, it shows up well in Google maps. In addition, in Google maps, if a prospect is looking at your competitor, Adwords express puts your listings in there. So it shows other similar businesses. It’s worth giving it a go, if you’ve got a small budget, just set it at $15 a day or $20 a day or something like that and give it a go and see how you go getting more leads and sales as a result.
Get 15% More Traffic By Doing This One Thing
Google Express is all about sending traffic to your product or service (so it’s not going to work for a content marketing strategy). They’ll let you run two or three ads. Overtime Google will tell you which one is performing best from rotating them all and then you can just kill the other ones and write new versions.
I find very rarely will this not work for small local business, it’s pretty amazing. I’m a google premier partner which means we go to google once a quarter and we have strategy calls with Google every two weeks. They recommend to us that we write a minimum of three ads on everything that we do. And by writing three ads, statistically, they say you’ll get 15 percent more traffic because one or two of the ads will perform a lot better than the others. When you write them, you just write 3 different hooks and 3 different calls to action and 3 different descriptions. With all marketing, you don’t really know what one’s going to work. All marketing is test and measure. You’ve just got to be willing to put it out into the marketplace, test, measure and then refine to get the best results.