Birmingham or your own town in the ad?

Write your own town in the ad and on the page, and let the targeting decide who sees it. A kitchen fitter in Wolverhampton whose headline says Birmingham loses the Wolverhampton click to a competitor whose headline says Wolverhampton, because the person typing kitchen fitters Wolverhampton reads the town as the proof that you come out to them. Birmingham belongs in the ad only for the searches that contain it, which for most businesses outside the city are a minority, and location insertion handles those automatically when the targeting is set by town. The Keyword Planner shows the town searches are real: PPC in Wolverhampton, Coventry, Dudley, West Bromwich, Cannock, Telford and Stafford each carry their own monthly searches for our own trade, and the same is true of every trade.

Why the city's name costs the click

A search with a town in it is a question about distance. The searcher wants to know that you will come to Dudley, that the showroom is in Coventry, that the phone is answered by someone who knows the Wolverhampton ring road. Birmingham in the headline answers the wrong question: it says the business is somewhere else, and it says it to the person who was deciding on exactly that. Google's own ad relevance reading agrees: an ad whose headline matches the search's town earns a better expected click-through rate, and the quality score that follows lowers the cost of every click in the ad group.

Three ways to put the town in, and when each fits

Town by town, what the page says

• Wolverhampton: the Black Country is not Birmingham to the people who live in it. The page says Wolverhampton and names the areas it covers, Bilston, Wednesfield, Tettenhall, and the ad says the same.
• Coventry: a city of its own with its own searches and its own universities. A Coventry business that writes Birmingham reads as a Birmingham business that travels. The page says Coventry and Warwickshire.
• Dudley and West Bromwich: the searches are small and local and the competition is often none. A page that names the town wins them cheaply; the city's name does nothing.
• Solihull: the one place where Birmingham in the ad can help, because Solihull searchers often type Birmingham for a city-wide service and Solihull for a local one. Run both, in two ad groups, each with its own word.
• Sutton Coldfield, Walsall, Lichfield: the same rule as Dudley, with the page carrying the town and the ad group carrying the town's searches.

The test is the search terms report sorted by the town. If the Wolverhampton searches are being answered by an ad that says Birmingham, the ad group is split by town and the headlines rewritten. It takes an afternoon and it is the cheapest quality score change in the account.

The Planner, town by town

The Keyword Planner gives every town's searches a size, and the sizes are small and real. For our own trade, PPC paired with Wolverhampton, Coventry, Dudley, West Bromwich, Cannock, Telford and Stafford each returns its own monthly figure, between ten and fifty searches a month, with the Shropshire and Droitwich pairings alongside. The same shape appears for a kitchen fitter, an accountant or a dentist: a Birmingham figure in the hundreds and a ring of town figures in the tens, each one typed by someone who means that town. The city figure is what an agency quotes; the ring is where a business outside the city actually wins, because the competition there is often nobody, and the click is cheap for the one page that says the town.

The order to do it in

1. Read the search terms report by town for the last 90 days and write down which towns appear and what each spent.
2. Split the ad group by town for every town with real spend, and write the town into the headline of each.
3. Build one page per town the business really serves, with the areas, the photographs and the jobs that make it that town's page, and land each ad group on its page.
4. Set the targeting by town, so that location insertion, where it is used, inserts the right name.
5. Read the quality score and the cost per click by ad group a month later, and the enquiries by town against the spend by town. That table is the report.

What this is not

It is not a town page for every town, written from a template. A page that could have any town's name swapped in is a doorway page, and Google filters sets of them as a group; the search work and the ads work both suffer. One page per town the business really serves, with the areas, the photographs and the jobs that make it that town's page, is the number to build to. For most businesses outside the city that is two or three pages, not fifteen. The targeting guide beside this one covers the radius and presence settings that decide who sees the ad; this guide is about what the ad and the page say to them once they do.