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specialize in SEO and social media marketing generally try to downplay pay-per-click marketing and claim that it is an outdated method of getting traffic to your website.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

Jay A. Moore

By Jay A. Moore,
Managing Editor

A lot of small business owners are guilty of putting up a webpage just so they have that golden little URL to slap on their business cards or in their Yellow Page ad.

Today, an online presence is a must and a lot of small business owners are guilty of not updating the content on their websites as frequently as they should. Many websites go two or more years without having an overhaul, and that’s not good for business. Without frequent updates, your site probably doesn’t engage your customers with current, relevant information. Would you want to eat a piece of rock-hard, stale, moldy bread? Why force feed stale content to your potential customers? WordPress is one of the best solutions for small business owners to keep their site up to date without having to pay a website designer a lot of money.

It’s less expensive than you think.
WordPress is an open source solution that has been around for over five years now. It is a stable, easy to use content management system, and its primary use is to create personal or business blogs. Since it’s an open source solution, there are a plethora of options that you can add to your site, and the flexibility in customizing your webpage is outstanding for a free solution.

Yes, I said free. Chances are you may need to pay a web designer to customize the site, but there are hundreds of templates available to choose from – at no cost – to help minimize the expense. Depending on the level of customization you need, you should be able to get your site transformed for far less than you paid for the original site. And since it is a blog format, you won’t have to pay for those small periodic product updates or employee info changes.

You’re an expert; flaunt it.
Why choose a blog format for your new site overhaul? You are an expert; whatever your business is, you can provide expert advice on that subject, and a blog is the best way to demonstrate that fact to your potential customers. Your online presence is a forum for you to showcase your abilities. Once a week, or once every few weeks depending on how current you think your content should be for your industry, you should post a new article on your site. It doesn’t take an expert long to crank out a half a page about something they know intimately, so the time investment is minimal.

It’s easier than you think.
With WordPress, you also have easy access to all of the information that doesn’t change often like general product or company information. These behind-the-scenes features let you make simple updates without knowing HTML, CSS, PHP or other complex coding languages.

WordPress has a sizeable community of developers that are continually adding functionality to the program through widgets. Widgets are tools that you can add to your site and provide anything from information tracking with Google Analytics, to contact forms, to picture slideshows. There are thousands of different modules that you can add to your site and more are being released daily.

This may sound complicated and there is a slight learning curve – just as there is with any new software. The first time you checked your email, you had to learn which button to click to reply, or to reply all, or to forward. Once you have posted a few blogs, you’ll be an old hat, and you’ll find that blogging isn’t that intimidating. In fact, most people like showing that they’re an expert once they get used to it.

Information = Money
Here’s an example of how WordPress might work for a small business. A small charter fishing operation in Hilton Head, South Carolina, has had a website for several years, but the content has not been updated – ever. The captain of the charter boat decides to start a blog on his website to demonstrate that he’s the expert on taking people to where the fish are biting. Once a week he posts a blog about his most successful outing. He includes a picture slideshow, and he puts in relevant key word tags for search engine optimization. His business starts to pick up, and using the Google Analytics plug-in, he can see that a lot of his new business is coming from the New York area. He has had several clients featured on his blog from the Big Apple so they must be spreading some positive word-of-mouth for his business. This basic information provides the captain with ample marketing opportunities to increase his business even further.

There are a number of other blog applications available including Blogger from Google and TypePad, however, WordPress seems to be the current, dominant tool for business blogs. WordPress itself is free, it’s relatively inexpensive to have a template customized for your business, and there are a lot of widgets to give your site interactive functionality. These are just a few of the reasons that transforming your website into a blog can have a positive impact on your business.

The website indysmallbiz.com is based on a WordPress blog and was customized by Jay A. Moore, our Managing Editor and freelance designer and copywriter. For more details, feel free to send us an email or visit http://wordpress.org/.