How San Diego Businesses Can Avoid Common Local PPC Mistakes

Local PPC mistakes are inevitable, even when working with a San Diego SEO agency. Basic errors, such as working with insufficient market data and running a poorly-built targeting strategy, are easily avoidable with the right advice.

This guide outlines other local San Diego PPC mistakes and how you can avoid them, including:

• Five local PPC mistakes that harm your business
• Five ways you can do San Diego local PPC right

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

Let’s go!

If you want to learn how Digital Authority Partners can increase your PPC effectiveness, watch this video!

5 Common Local PPC Mistakes That Hurt Your Business

By design, local PPC (pay-per-click) increases the ROI of small businesses. However, suppose you are not careful about using it in your digital marketing strategy. It is incredibly hard to avoid mistakes when there are so many factors to track simultaneously just to have a functional PPC strategy.

Examples of elementary mistakes and oversights that can hurt local PPC include the following:

1. Not knowing what your audience wants or whether your solutions fit the target market.
2. Using the wrong target or too broad keywords in your local San Diego PPC campaign.
3. Being too ambitious about the scope of your ad targeting wastes your ad budget.
4. Enabling too many triggers that are irrelevant to your PPC ads or business strategy.
5. Failing to eliminate low-quality search matches through the use of negative keywords.

As you can see, many of the problems that you encounter with PPC stem from the same or related sources. Specifically, either you have inadequate information to run the campaign or you are not using the ones that you do have correctly. Fortunately, these problems each come with quick and easy fixes.

Below are five excellent PPC strategies to avoid the common mistakes previously listed.

5 Strategies To Help You Do San Diego Local PPC Right

For every misstep that you can make, a San Diego SEO agency has a strategy or solution ready to set things right again. These fixes are simple enough to do yourself if necessary. However, you might need to invest in tools to get it done in-house. Hiring an agency works, too.

Free versions are plentiful but often lack efficiency, which is critical if you have already made the error. The downside is that a free version can also slow the assembly of pressing local PPC strategies. Otherwise, it works fine. Read below for five ways you can avoid common mistakes and secure success.

     1. Gather More Data on Customers

San Diego businesses rely on PPC, especially local PPC, to get more customers at a low cost. However, it becomes difficult to generate PPC leads if there is an obvious mismatch between who your target market really is and what you know about them. The solution is in-depth market research.

Unless you hear it straight from the customer (or draw conclusions from lots of data), you can not know their major pain points. Always make it your priority to find out, as this is what shapes the best approach to generating leads in San Diego.

     2. Increase Ad Targeting Precision

Precision in ad targeting sets the tone for whether local PPC is a win or a loss. Because people respond differently to stimuli (in this case, ads or landing pages), targeted ads and landing pages are highly valuable for your strategy.

Personalization matters a lot in marketing, too. People respond better if they feel like something was made with them in mind. Your ultimate goal should be to match leads as closely as possible with ads, offers, and landing pages that work best for their mindset or personality.

     3. Start with Geotargeting Your PPC

Local is a relative term — it can be your neighborhood, city, county, or even state, depending on how far-reaching your business is (e.g., San Diego City versus San Diego County). You need to distinguish the areas that your business wants to serve.

When the time comes to expand beyond your local community, ensure that your geotargeting remains accurate. Because local PPC is not one-size-fits-all, have a plan. Each location has its own unique and common features, cultures, and concerns that must be adopted into your strategy.

     4. Know the Different Match Types

Even with using the best keywords, your strategy is unlikely to go far if you do not use match types effectively. A match type controls the related keywords for which your ads appear. For instance, exact match allows search term variations of your keyword to trigger your ad.

Variations, in this case, include misspellings, singular and plural forms, stemming, and others. Match types have overlaps but also have distinct use cases that you should know beforehand. Making mistakes with your choice here can mean trouble for your PPC campaign ad budget.

     5. Filter Using Negative Keywords

Lastly, never leave out filtering negative keywords from your local San Diego PPC strategy. If used correctly alongside match types and target keywords, you can completely control how and when someone can trigger your ads, or at least, up to the extent that the ad platform allows.

This way, you can almost guarantee that people who find you will want what you have to offer. Another benefit of an excellently planned keyword strategy is that it reduces potential vulnerability to click fraud. The more precise you are, the better, and you can rest assured that you have done all that you could with PPC.

Summing Up

Making mistakes in your digital marketing strategy can result in more than just lost time and wasted effort. You risk a financial bleed for any missteps or miscalculations in local PPC unless you hire a San Diego SEO agency to care for your business. If not, DIY fixes are also available.

You can review your keyword strategy and correct any flaws. You can gather more or better market data to refresh your approach to PPC, or try to look for any mismatch between customers and your business. Many options exist for every possible issue.

Need help fixing your local San Diego PPC strategy? Contact Digital Authority Partner (DAP) to learn how we can help.