Can you use PPC to target local customers?

In my experience you would be able to use adwords to target your local area for your targeted keywords. Now you won't be able to get hyper local like a certain street or community.

An example of a targeted local keyword would be
"house painting contractors in (your target area)"

You would want to create an ad group for each area that you target and create either a relevant landing page or capture page for leads.

The best way I have seen this work is to set your ads to mobile and add call extension to your ads and click to call so that when someone click on your add it automatically takes them to calling you. Calls as conversions!!
https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2453991?hl=en

Hope this helps!!

You can do it, roughly. It depends on what you mean by neighborhood.

In order to set a location on Google Adwords, you'll want to go to Campaigns, then select your campaign, hit settings. Go to locations. Expand it. Then hit "advanced search." The default tab is "Search". You can put in zip codes or town names in order to add/exclude them from your campaign. You can also use radius targeting, which is what I prefer. You can even use radius targeting and then exclude certain areas, which'd look something like this (showing all three functions together; red is excluded:



The only thing with this, although I need to verify it, is that I think it still serves ads to people who search for your area, but aren't actually there. What I mean is that if someone's in, say, Orlando, FL and searches for "general contracting new york city", your ad may still be shown even though their location isn't set to New York City because of the way Google handles local searches. It's not the end of the world and will make up a small minority of searches, but it's still something to be aware of, especially if you're in a town named something like Greenville (most common town name in the US).

But again, I need to verify this.

Set with geo graphic settings with google adwords .

Why complicate things?

I imagine you would have a better ROI If you hire someone to walk the neighborhood posting printed flyers door to door. Or even direct mail.

Although the OP might have put it wrong he most likely meant local AREA. I know of no Painting business that only looks for business in one neighborhood. SEO and PPC is fine for this. Painting pays fairly well so they will certainly travel anywhere within a 30-45 minute radius for a full house painting job.