Charlotte is a bustling, thoroughly modern city, and is one of the capitals of the “new economy” along the eastern US seaboard. There’s a lot of opportunity in Charlotte for a locally based business to experiment with new and innovative ways to promote their brand, increase traffic, and generate a boost in their bottom line. Naturally, one of the quickest and most immediately effective ways to do these things is through pay-per-click, in all of its varied forms. PPC advertising can quickly run away from an inexperienced manager, however, if it isn’t handled properly and with extreme care. This results in dramatic cost overruns, and a poor return on your investment.
One of the most important aspects of ensuring that you get the most bang for your buck with PPC advertising is to optimize your choice of keywords. There are a variety of tools online which may be used, freely or at low cost, to ensure that the words you’re bidding on are in fact currently trending. This is particularly important when you’re focusing on a largely or exclusively local audience. Most of these tools, in particular Google’s Adwords planner, allow you to refine your search for trending keywords by location and industry.
Sample Topics for Charlotte, North Carolina
A free search for trending topics in Charlotte, made via BuzzSumo at the time of this writing, comes up with a wide variety of local subjects which are attracting the most attention in social media. Mostly, these are related to minor crimes, sporting events, and a few feel-good heart-warmers (such as, halfway down the list, the story of a German shepherd who has been rescued and put up for adoption). Most of the topics are related to the city’s entertainment scene: professional sports and the theater figure prominently. If you were to be writing a blog about sports in and around the Charlotte area, you could do far worse – according to these results – than if you were to mention the Carolina Panthers. They are presently 10-0, having recently defeated the Washington Redskins by an impressive score of 44-16. Mention of this event, with keywords such as “Panthers” and “Washington” (as well as “Cowboys,” whom the Panthers faced on Thanksgiving day) would be certain to draw traffic from Charlotte-based football fans currently.
Charlotte is also the second-largest banking and financial center in the United States; it’s the home of the headquarters of Bank of America, among other historic institutions. Charlotte’s financial industry employs more than sixty thousand people. A quick keyword search for banking and financially-related information points towards a possibly unsurprising focus on fraud, specifically that which is perpetrated by large, multinational financial interests. One article on a certain subset of Wells Fargo bankers has almost sixty-four thousand shares on Facebook alone, and is still trending high on the list of results after several months. Meanwhile, a popular blog posted over the past summer discusses the latest trend in banks introducing new, digitally-delivered services to help make their customers’ lives more convenient in unexpected ways; this ties into digital banking, another popular subject matter. This blog has over seventy-four thousand shares on Google+. Some suggested keywords for a Charlotte-based financial interest might include “fraud,” “digital banking,” and “digital services.”
In closing, let’s look at one more example of a major industry within the greater Charlotte region. The area offers a number of key aerospace and defense companies, such as BAE Systems and Curtiss-Wright Controls. These and other defense and aerospace contractors in and around Charlotte, North Carolina employ more than twenty thousand people. Major keywords within this industry, relevant to the Charlotte area specifically, would include such examples as “Aerospace jobs,” “growth industry,” and “Charlotte economic development.” These are all trending very highly with publications commanding considerable circulation, and the information is recent. They aren’t doing well in social media, but they are commanding significant readership at the source.
Simple Searches and Social Media Analysis Will Guarantee Results
The aforementioned topics and specific keywords were uncovered in a variety of ways, all of which made use of free search functionality available online… whether through the organic results of a Google search, or a specific inquiry made to BuzzSumo or Google AdWords. Armed with current information, and with a little money to spend, a PPC advertising manager could take advantage of this information to generate a quick burst of traffic to a topic-specific website. Once you have that quick boost in place, standard SEO and social media marketing will serve to provide a continuous, passive boost to your PPC and other search engine marketing efforts. As long as your content stays relevant, people will continue to spread the word about your brand, and your bottom line will reflect the difference.
