Google Adwords gives you the capability to geotarget your campaigns - you can target your keywords to a specific location, be it state, city or custom. When you do this there’s no need to include the name of the location in the keywords that you use i.e. “Dentists in Lancaster”, as the ad will display when the search engine detects that the ip address of the searcher is located in the Lancaster area, so just simply having the keyword “Dentists” will be good enough. However, from my experience, it seems as though there can still be a benefit from leaving a version of the original keyword in the campaign, as users will type in the fully qualified search that they want i.e. “Dentists in Lancaster”. From geotargeted campaigns that I’ve run with both the location specific and non-location specific keywords in there the location specific keywords have performed at a much higher click through rate than the non-location specific keywords.

Interestingly, when I worked with some other SEM companies on a project, they asked for a list of keywords for the campaign they were working with, one of the first things they said when they received the list was that we “didn’t need the location in there, as it’s taken care of with the geotargeting”, and so they stripped out the location specific keywords…