Many of our clients such as TeachStreet and Sci Whistler have specific geographic needs for their search engine marketing (SEM) and online advertising campaigns. The common name for optimizing local keyword traffic is geo-targeting. There is a great deal of research that goes into a good geo-targeted campaign and the final implementation will use strategies and techniques to bring relevant, targeted traffic to your site. Here are some of the big points to plan for when optimizing localized keywords and geo-targeting.

Your content should necessitate geo-targeting
If you’re a company that has a free online photo editing tool, you probably don’t need geo-targeting. However, if you’re the local print shop or an architectural firm, or if your site is specific to a certain country, or if your site has content specific to many locations, then you’re an ideal candidate for geo-targeted online marketing.

Know the size of your markets
You can start with statistics on wikipedia or the US Census. You can decide if you want to target the top cities throughout the USA, or you can see if your hyper-local business blog in Peoria will have enough of an audience to make your investment pay off.

Keyword Search Volume by Selected Geography

I also like to use Google’s keyword tool to give me an idea of monthly search volume for geographic terms. The chart below shows the geographic funnel and indicates how rarely people go all the way down to a zip code. Generally, a city is about as granular as you should go if you expect measurable SEM volume. Sometimes a neighborhood might work for you as well, but don’t expect a large search volume.

Techniques for building geo-targeted campaigns
There are two ways to partition out localized traffic using Google’s AdWords platform.

1. Use IP Address based targeting Using google adwords manager, target a campaign to a specific geography in the “Target audience” section with the campaign options. This will target your site using the visitor’s IP address and approximating the location of the user based on that address. This method doesn’t scale too well since it requires the creation of new campaigns for each geo-target.
2. Build out a well-organized and geo-targeted campaign
   The second method of building out a geo-targeted ad campaign is a bit more intensive. It involves combining your keywords with geographies. As you might expect, this can “blow up” your keyword list. Fortunately, Google’s made some of this a bit easier through their dynamic ad content. This allows you to create one ad, while changing out the text to reflect your specific keywords. Once you’ve put your geo-targeted list together, make sure that your landing page content is geographically and contextually relevant to the searched terms, and you’re ready to go.