Listing For “Near Me” Searches in 10 Minutes or Less

want to cut through the noise?

We don’t know how many times we have put in “dry cleaners near me” or “restaurants near me” or “[insert service or professional] near me” into a Google search on our laptops or our phones. These searches are becoming increasingly popular each and every year. Showing up in them is a must for any business.

Why does a business need to list for these searches?

The point of listing for “near me” searches is to find people when they are the likeliest to turn into leads or customers for our business. They are considered “bottom of the funnel” searches for both service and product based businesses.

Not sure what I mean by “bottom of the funnel?” Sales funnels are where people go from problem to solution. Looking at searches in a funnel, let’s examine how one may start.

A “top of funnel” search would be someone recognizing a problem and searching for solutions. For instance, someone with tax problems may search for “best way to deal with an audit.” Searcher has recognized a problem they may be unable to solve on their own and are actively searching for a solution. Their next search could be to understand how much this problem is going to cost. For instance: “How much does an audit cost?” or “How much does an accountant cost for an audit?”. By this point they could be confident an accountant will help fix their problem. Time to find an accountant. This would be their bottom of the funnel search “Accountants Near Me.” This is the point or moment we want our business to be found.

Considering this, we want to list in two spots on the search results: top of the search results (before the map) and on the map:

Before the map:

On the map:

Setting Up Your Listing For “Near Me” Searches

Depending on how we currently list your business, we may need to setup a new campaign. For instance, if we only list in a specific geographical area, we may not need to create a new campaign. We could just use a bid modifier (to increase your bid) for areas we want to list in. Then, add an ad group and keywords for the “near me” searches. In this example, we are going to show how we would setup a business for these searches using a brand new campaign setup.

First thing we would do is select the campaign type. Start by hitting “Search” and “Website traffic.”

The next important step is to add the location you want to target:

Make sure you select (in location options) “People in your targeted location” and “People in your excluded locations”

We may want to add proximity rings around your location like this:

This will allow us to adjust our bids for each proximity ring as you may find higher value or higher converting customers closer to your location.

The bid adjustment would happen here:

Location Factors to Consider For Your Business

These factors are specific to your business and customer base. Here are four factors to consider that could affect the way you setup this campaign.

Time of Day

Using restaurants as an example, we may only want to list for a very small radius. Logic being, someone may be looking for a restaurant they can walk to or a place they can get a quick bite if they are on their lunch break. Adding to the restaurant example, time of day could become a factor (to radius or location targeting) as you could open up the radius for other times of the day (evenings or outside of lunch hours).

Geography Around Location

Your business could be in a very dense/populated area or could be located in a small town. In your area there could be limited options or your business could be located in a large city where most people are unwilling to walk or drive far to a business like yours. For small town businesses, they could be located in a downtown area where everyone in that town and surrounding areas travel to for businesses like yours. Radius or location targeting becomes specific to the geography and where your customer base is located.

Competition

Competition could be a factor as well as these searches could be costly. In that case, we would be look for trends on where your customers located. If you find your customers are only coming from a specific area or postal code, we should limit the ads to only showing in the geographical area or specific postal code where your customer base is located. An example of this is selling a high ticket service like wealth management. Our CPC cost could be quite high ($20 or higher). After a while, we notice a lot of your customers/clients are mainly coming from a specific postal code. Knowing that, we only list for “wealth managers near me” in those postal codes. Doing this will lower our cost per lead and increase our conversion rate. Allowing us to spend more on ads, acquiring even more customers and beating our competition.

Weather

We may notice that when it rains or drops below a certain temperature, people are less likely to walk through the doors of our business. Money spent on ads during these times could potentially be wasteful. On the other side of the coin, when it is sunny and above a certain temperature, we have a lot of people searching and coming into our place of business. Recognizing this, we adjust our bids during specified weather situations. This means our ad budget becomes further optimized by eliminating waste and ensuring people find our business when the weather is best.

You cannot set this up in Google ads currently but you can add a script which is explained by Google here:

Weather-based Campaign Management | Google Ads scripts | Google Developers

The Keywords, Ad Copy & Offer

Keywords

Using a dry cleaner as an example we would build a keyword list like the following:

For the dry cleaner example, there is not a negative keyword list that I would except for a competitor list. For example we would not want to list for “Parkers Dry Cleaner near me.” We would place “Parkers” on this campaign or ad group’s negative keyword list.

Ad Copy

The ad copy and offer are critical to making our “near me” campaign successful.

The ad copy (for most businesses) should include address or areas we serve, plus any differentiator(s) we have over your competitors.

Using a Dry Cleaner as an example:

When we see this headline we (at least me) immediately think “Wow same day service plus free pickup and delivery!” We are sold. Oh, and we know exactly where to go to drop it off or pick it up (if needed). We may not need those things at the moment but these differentiators may be something that moves us to use that service.

If that doesn’t get us to commit to their service maybe we start looking for more.

The Offer

Here is where an offer comes into play:

If we are not sold on this service (by now) it would only be because we found a better offer from another dry cleaner. Or a dry cleaner that inconveniences us less. Doubtful, but possible.

We covered this in another post but as a reminder. We want our ad copy to validate the searcher’s search and offer something too compelling for the searcher to pass up.

Setting Your Campaign Live

With any new campaign after you set it live, we want to keep your budget relatively small and watch it closely for the first couple of days. When we are confident the setup keywords are correct we can increase the budget.

In closing, listing for these searches will make your business accessible to potential customers when they need you the most.

Happy Marketing

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