Jay A. Moore
On-line marketing has evolved into a huge industry. With all the hype today about search engine optimization and social media, it’s easy for small business owners to overlook good old pay-per-click advertising. All of your on-line marketing efforts need to work together to bring you those new customers and while it’s great that you’ve got a few hundred followers on Twitter and your website ranks on the top page of results for five or six of your major keywords, what about the twenty other keywords that are relevant to your business or targeted local search results for specific cities that you service?
Many companies that specialize in SEO and social media marketing generally try to downplay pay-per-click marketing and claim that it is an outdated method of getting traffic to your website. However, when handled correctly, PPC is still a critical part of any on-line marketing strategy.
Keywords are the key. The most important part of a pay-per-click campaign is choosing the right keywords. You want to make sure you get words with plenty of search volume but you also want to make sure you get relevant terms. For example, the phrase “website design” gets 1,500,000 monthly searches. While that’s excellent volume, it’s not very specific so the bid will be very high to rank for these ads and the conversion rate will be low. Google AdWords provides an excellent tool to find the best words for your site:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Other excellent sources of keywords are your competitor’s websites. If you view the source code, you can easily find the keywords that they have used in their meta data. This can potentially help you get an edge on other businesses in your market.
Local, local, local. Make sure that on your top five or six keywords that you are including geo-targeting information. For example, “Indianapolis website design” is a lower volume keyword than just “Website design” but the traffic is much more relevant. The farther down the long-tail you go, the more specific the search and the higher your website conversion rates. On the flip side, the more specific, the lower the search volume but with a PPC campaign, you’re not limited on the number of keywords you can bid on so choose a lot and adjust your bids accordingly.
Set a budget you can live with. You don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on a PPC campaign for it to be effective, unless you are trying to go toe-to-toe with a huge national brand. I’ve helped companies on a shoe-string budget get results from PPC ads. As an example, in January, a small design firm set a budget of $25 for the month. We set up two campaigns on Google AdWords, one for a very local audience and one for a larger geographic area. Their ads were displayed over 1,000 times during the course of the month and they only received 4 clicks through to their website. That is a low conversion but the total ad cost for the month was only $3.31. That small company is now working to close a deal for over $3,000. That’s a substantial return on a marketing investment.
Track and Revise. On-line marketing provides the opportunity to actively check results and update your campaigns as necessary. Once you send out that direct mailing, you can’t exactly make changes and resend it to those potential customers if it isn’t performing well. With PPC marketing, you should be making changes on at least a monthly basis. Both adjustments in your ad copy and your bids should be made regularly.
Don’t be Afraid to Ask for Help. Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines provide very comprehensive tools for using their PPC campaigns but for the beginner, these can still be intimidating. There are companies that can help you set up your campaigns and then show you how to manage the bid and copy updates or there are more full-service firms that will manage the campaigns for you for a fee. If you are not comfortable starting a small campaign on your own, make sure you get a firm or a consultant with strong references.
So, choose your keywords, set up a Google PPC account and get started if you haven’t already. PPC accounts are relatively simple to set up. You don’t need a large budget and PPC is a great compliment to your SEO and social media marketing.
Jay A. Moore is a part-time freelance consultant and can be reached at jay@jayamoore.com or by cell at (812) 208-4734
Tags: indianapolis small business, internet marketing
