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We received a promotion offer from Google Adwords to tempt us to try the AdWords service (spend at least 25 in the next few months and get 75 credit). But this is a small local business that is only interested in drawing traffic from the surrounding area so only wants to market to people within driving range.

It has been suggested (by someone with more experience of online marketing than I have) that Google Adwords is not really a suitable marketing tool for small Local Businesses looking to draw in traffic only from their immediate area. They indicated AdWords is a tool that should only be used by those looking to market nationally or statewide, and they suggested that for small local business, forget AdWords and put the same marketing effort/spend into improving/driving "Google My Business" instead.

Are they correct? Is google AdWords pointless for Local Marketing?

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Adwords is and continues to be a powerful method of attracting potential customers through local search. I'm not sure where you read that Adwords doesn't support local searches, you only need to do a search for Web Design Bournemouth, Plumber in Bournemouth and so forth and check out the ads. You can read more about setting up local ads in Googles Adword help center.

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I think it different on each case. You have to do some research about the keywords of your local business to see if those keywords have local interest. Try to get the search volume on Google Adwords Keyword Planner https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

For example the business is plumber in Bournemouth, try to input "plumber in bournemouth", "plumber bournemouth", "bournemouth plumber" and other related keywords (without quote). See if those keywords have enough volume. If the keywords have enough monthly search volume, it's good to use Adwords for your local business. If it's not enough search volume, it still has chance to profit from Adwords, try the Adwords with small budget to test the water.

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There are a couple of different ways to look at it. First, since you're business will attract only people close by, I would say you should invest some time creating and managing pages such as a google+, facebook, yelp, and other directories. Make sure you create business pages on google maps, bing maps and others as some of the results when a customer is looking for a local business come from maps, such as google or bing for example, so make sure you can be seen there. Furthermore, You should absolutely take a chance with google adwords. After all, those ads display first on a search results page. You can cater your needs to only have your ads display for certain regions within a range of miles for example, for only certain keywords that you know won't be a waste of money, like setting up negative keywords such as "cheap", "free", "ideas" (this is just a general concept). That's a good way to funnel in only what you think will be worthy customers and will not be consuming your budget on adwords. By the way, you can limit a daily budget, so you have control of how much you are spending.

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I would do it with facebook advertising; it crunches data so that really only local customers are reached. I would give it a try

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