Why San Diego Small Businesses Benefit Most From Local PPC

When a San Diego PPC agency tells you that local is the way to go, believe it. You might already know that local search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most valuable actionable items for any small business. Local PPC is just one part of it.

This guide presents seven of the best small business benefits of doing San Diego local PPC:

1. Better PPC results sooner
2. Reduce the influence of algorithms
3. Easily monitor cost and progress
4. Ramp up brand awareness efforts
5. Customers are within your reach
6. Less competition for your business
7. Cost-effective and time-efficient

There’s a lot to discuss, so get ready to take notes.

Let’s go!

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7 Benefits of Doing Local San Diego PPC

The overall benefit of pay-per-click (PPC) is that just about every part of it is fully customizable. Doing PPC for San Diego small businesses gives you complete control over many aspects of your marketing strategy, from cost to timing to reach. Here are seven benefits discussed in detail:

     1. Better PPC Results Sooner

As mentioned above, local is always the best choice for small businesses. After all, that is where most of your traffic comes from, unless you have the resources to serve customers on a state or national level. Local PPC efforts, therefore, pay off sooner and with better results than just PPC.

Essentially, since you are targeting a smaller area and demographic population, you can immediately see whether or not your business is making the waves that you expect. You might also aim to draw customers from outside of the city, which is measurable as well.

Whichever market you target, you have digital (website) and physical (store) traffic as indicators of your campaign’s effectiveness. Coupled with the straightforward methods of calculating your PPC return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS), and profits per click and impression, local PPC makes your job much easier.

     2. Reduce the Influence of Algorithms

The problem with organic methods for growing your business lies in the difficult of figuring out search engine algorithms. They can be very particular about which content is good and relevant. SEO guidelines include the following:

• Creating content that fulfills the requirements based on Google’s E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) quality rating.
• Making full use of meta tags, such as meta descriptions and image alt tags, for ranking.
• Building your website’s backlink profile and domain authority (DA) to establish credibility.

Other factors also contribute to how search engine algorithms determine your content’s placement on the results page. PPC lets you jump ahead of organic results without extra effort, though its effectiveness correlates to how much you spend on ad bidding. Hence, cutting the line has its price.

     3. Easily Monitor Cost and Progress

One of the best benefits of using local San Diego PPC is that it is a readily scalable marketing strategy. For instance, you can start by targeting a few neighborhoods, say, the Gaslamp Quarter, then slowly work towards expanding to Ocean Beach, Mission Beach, and Pacific Beach.

You will know when it is time to grow your business and scale your strategy by looking at how well your campaign’s ROI and ROAS contribute to overall profits. Ad platforms make this straightforward, but hiring a San Diego PPC agency makes tracking analytics easier.

     4. Ramp Up Brand Awareness Efforts

As with any other digital marketing strategy, a local San Diego PPC strategy increases brand visibility, especially among your core audience. Ad targeting and retargeting help you find your main audience through keywords and filters that test how different segments respond to you.

You can also set your campaign goals according to how much exposure you want, though this does affect how much you ultimately spend on your campaign. Exposure does not necessarily mean conversions. It does, however, help people know that your brand exists. 

     5. Customers Are Within Your Reach

Economic recovery from the pandemic has spurred interest in new ventures within San Diego. This means that you need to start reaching local customers as soon as possible. If giants like Amazon want to grow their presence in San Diego, you know the competition is getting hot.

Local PPC gives you an edge because you know your potential customers better than a startup or out-of-town tech giant. You know what they want and what they need better than newcomers. However, you do have to make them realize that through your PPC ads.

     6. Less Competition for Your Business

It sounds counterintuitive, given the previous point, but local PPC reduces the level of competition for your business. Again, this refers to knowing your customers better. To do PPC, especially local PPC, you must understand how your target market thinks and acts.

For instance, using colloquial terms in your sales copy allows you to capture market segments that respond to or use those terms in searches. Competitors might be too focused on optimizing for search engines, to properly optimize their strategies for customers. In this case, you can win big with local PPC.

     7. Cost-Effective and Time-Efficient

Running a PPC campaign is much cheaper and faster than traditional marketing strategies. You can start and stop at any time, apply updates in between to correct flaws, and run it however you see fit. However, an ineffective ad budget stands between you and a successful local PPC campaign.

That is not to say that cost effectiveness and time efficiency are present from the beginning. You have to work to find the right balance between bidding too much or too little. After that, you will need to check regularly to ensure that the campaign is still optimal for your strategy.

Summing Up

Local PPC has a place – a prominent place – in every small business’s marketing strategy, because of how cost-effective it is to use it over other forms of digital marketing. PPC also lets you bypass challenging search engine algorithms to get ahead of competitors, all for the right price.

It gets even better when you decide to hire a San Diego PPC agency to run your local campaign, which frees you up to attend to other business activities. Overall, local PPC works great for small businesses because most parts of it can be easily automated. 

Need help setting up a San Diego local PPC strategy? Contact Digital Authority Partners (DAP) to learn how we can help.