How to Advertise Your Computer Repair Business
Thanks to online advertising networks like AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing, small computer repair businesses (even home-based ones) can easily promote themselves locally. Now that Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising can essentially buy you customers, you can advertise your computer repair business on local websites and have it show up alongside search engine results.
How to Show Up Next to Search Results
You pay for terms like computer repair, virus removal, and computer service. When people search for computer repair, your business shows up on the side. By defining your region (discussed below), you can make sure to only advertise to people in your area.
Search Advertising Example
In the example above, ads appear on the right. The computer repair advertiser only pays when someone clicks their ad. $1.00 to $5.00 per click is typical for a computer repair advertisement click, although pricing varies by region and day. So, if 20% of those clicks result in a phone call, then you would pay about $5 to $25 per lead in this example. Lower bids buy you a lower position (fewer clicks), and this might be acceptable when testing your business if you want to start slowly by spending little.
How to Show Up on Related Web Sites
You can also pay to have your website ads show up embedded on local websites. You're probably familiar with the contextual text ad blocks that show up everywhere, and you can add your business's ad without much extra effort.
Let's suppose you've decided that you want your advertisements to show up on web pages discussing computer repair. To cause your ads to show up on those pages, you would create an "Ad Group", which links your advertisements to keywords. The keywords you enter should form a theme - for example, a theme of "computer repair". Your theme might include the following keywords:
- computer repair
- pc repair
- desktop repair
- laptop repair
Now your computer repair ads show up on sites discussing computer repair!
Getting the Most Out of Local Advertising
If you have a very low advertising budget, don't rule out PPC advertising altogether. Instead, target a small local area, and bid less. Be sure to spread your budget over both Search Advertising and Content Advertising to maximize ROI.
It's important to limiting the reach of your advertising to people browsing the web in your local area, just like with search advertising. In the image below, note how a local computer repair business bids higher (darker areas) for advertisements that display closer to the shop.
Bid according to potential.
Learning More
This has been an introduction to advertising your computer repair business using PPC online advertising. When you are ready to begin advertising your computer business online, get started right away with a small budget (place low bids; advertise in a small target area). As you learn more, raise your advertising budget. Start by learning Google's AdWords since they have a dominant market share and will get you the most traffic. Later, expand to Yahoo and Microsoft's ad networks to increase your reach.
