This paragraph at WebProNews can be a bit misleading:
Galen De Young, managing director of Francis SEO, says research suggests b2b customers overwhelmingly ignore PPC ads in favor of organic listings. That and local search often fails to present businesses that serve a larger area than just their home base, or also nearby cities.
I’d never discount the value of SEO. That would be foolhardy. But most PPC campaigns fail to deliver positive results because the advertisers either don’t understand PPC optimization practices or used the wrong strategies. It isn’t the fault of the advertising.
If you look at PPC as a lot like newspaper advertising then you’ll do it better. Let’s say you run a company that is based out of Wayzata, Minnesota. If you have locations in other areas outside of that specific geographic area then you should have a PPC campaign and a landing page for each location, not just one campaign for the entire business. The reason is because your customers are not going to drive all over Timbuktu looking for your locations. They want the one that is closest to them.
If you were running newspaper advertisements to drive traffic to your brick and mortar store at various locations, you would either list your locations by address in the same ad and run that ad in every local newspaper in the areas that you serve or run a separate ad in each newspaper with the address of the closest store for that area. With PPC, the first option is not an option. You have limited space to tell your story, unlike a newspaper ad.
That’s why you need to limit each PPC campaign to one particular service area. Each store should have its own ad and should be focused on reaching consumers that will search for that store within the specific geographic area in which that store exists. When you do that effectively then you’ll understand the high value of PPC. If you aren’t doing it that way then you’ll likely go sour on PPC long before you realize it’s true potential.
