Why metros are expensive
Because every advertiser in the region targets them. Auction prices reflect the concentration of competitors, not the value of the customer, so you pay metro rates for a job that pays the same as one twenty miles out.
Meanwhile the county next door has households with the same problems, the same budgets, and two competitors instead of forty.
How to spot the opportunity
Compare cost per click and cost per lead by geography inside your existing campaigns — most accounts have this data and nobody looks at it. The gap between your metro core and your outer areas is frequently large.
Then check drive time honestly. If you will serve it, advertise it separately rather than letting one campaign average the two markets together.
Run them as separate campaigns
Same service, separate campaign per market, separate budget. Averaged campaigns hide the cheap market’s performance inside the expensive market’s costs, so you never see the opportunity.
Separate also lets you match the message: rural and small-town markets often respond better to plain, direct copy and to explicit mention of the town or county by name.
The page that makes it work
A landing page that names the place. Someone in a smaller county searching for a service is unusually responsive to seeing their own county named — it answers the question they actually have, which is whether you come out this far.
That is the whole logic behind location pages, and it is why they convert better than a generic service page for the same spend.