Tag Archives: Pay per click

Bigger Picture, Contractor Marketing, Denver SEO, Do It Yourself SEO, Internet Marketing, On Line Reviews, SEO, SEO Analysis Denver, Social Media, Uncategorized

How To Jump Start Your Sales In Five Steps Using the Internet

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Most businesses need a sales boost now and then, the challenge is making that happen quickly.

If you are waiting for Referrals to call you, well that happens when that happens.

So how can a business find sales fast using the Internet?  You are going to need to advertise.  It’s the only quick way to find new prospects online, which isn’t a terrible thing, as long as you have a well thought out plan, and campaign.

Let’s use the number one method in the world for online advertising, Google Ad Words program.  That’s when you place an ad on the Google search results for the keywords that prospects use to find your business.  You can place your ad on just the Google search and partners sites, or on Google and all the Ad Sense partners they have (you know, when you see an ad for a business on a site you are viewing, not a Search engine?  Those ads are placed (in many cases) through the Google Ad Sense program.

Here is what a normal Google Ad Words ad looks like on a search result page for someone search for a Dentist in Denver.

dentists in denver Google Search

Your ad is placed on the search result page according to three basic criteria. The amount you are willing to pay for someone to click on your ad compared to the other advertisers, the relevancy of the ad to the keyword search, and the relevancy of your ad to the page the search leads to on your site (called a landing page, this doesn’t need to be a home page).

Google is a very powerful lead generation source for many businesses.

So here are the steps to get started and have an ad showing in one day.

  1. Develop your budget.  For bigger ticket sales assume a 20% cost of sale based on your Gross Margin for the advertising if you have no other metric to use. So if you sell a $40,000 item, your gross is $6,000.  You should assume you will pay $1200.  for one sale. Yes, that may sound expensive, and its only a rule of thumb.  You may do significantly better, or if you can lose money on advertising if you are not careful.
  2. Develop a landing page where your prospects will “land” when they click on your ad.  There is a ton of information online about how to build a great landing page.  Sometimes you already have this page on your site and you won’t have to change a thing.  Or you can start with a home page as you build a better landing page. In a great ad words program you might end up with 10 or more landing pages designed for specific type searches, but for right now, lets get this program running!
  3. Build your Ad Words program.  You can do this on your own using Ad Words Express, where Google does all the work for you, or build it yourself.  Building it yourself, or using a company to do so is a better choice. You’ll have far better control and insight on how the program is performing. There are lots of little tactics you need to be aware of, but the big buckets are, Type of keyword match you use, the locations of where you want your ads run, the time of day and days you will be running your ads, daily budget, ad groups, campaigns, producing multiple ads for testing,and bid amounts you pay for each keyword. (  a good reason to use us to at least set up and monitor the program)
  4.  Have a plan on how you will respond to each inquire.  They may contact you through your contact form, or call. Be prepared to answer the call, or call then as soon as possible from a contact form inquire.  You may want to write a script for yourself or the person answering the calls with the qualifying questions you want to ask.  Have a calendar ready to schedule an appointment.
  5. Track all your results. With any advertising, you need to understand what is working, and what doesn’t.  You need to plan to spend some money on the learning process as you understand what keywords pay off, and which ones are a money pit. Good idea to   have Google analytics on your site.  And make sure you monitor your Ad Words program daily for the first 30 days.

Okay, it may sound overwhelming,  but many small businesses do this on there own.  If you are in a hurry, or just feel more comfortable letting an experience company manage this for you, please call us for a free assessment of how this would work for your business.

720-254-1234

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Denver SEO, Internet Marketing, SEO

Add Pay Per Click to Your SEO Campaigns?

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Time to Add Pay Per Click to Your Denver SEO Campaigns? The Answer is yes.

Google has done a masterful job of slowly, yet consistently diminishing the visibility of the local maps on search engine results over the last 18 months.

Let me give you an example.  Here are the results from a search for Mold Removal Denver about 2 years ago.

Here they are now (June 2012)

Here’s another example of Electrician Northglenn CO. from a few years ago.

Here are the results today:

For a great overview and infographic on this read and view the David Mihm web design and Local SEO blog at   http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/google/world/

It’s pretty clear… for great Internet visibility for your site, working on Google Maps (now Google Plus Local) is only part of the strategy. Not long ago it could provide the vast majority of your traffic. Today, it’s only a piece.

I have been involved very recently in two conversations where clients are under the impression that people don’t click on the Pay Per Click ads. This is very understandable from someone who knows something about how Google serves search results, because we all know someone just paid to be there. As I pointed out in each conversation, it is somewhat amazing to me how many Denver business owners are NOT aware that the top three results (in many cases) are in fact paid advertising.  And the more recent research seems to indicate that generically, about 15% of clicks are on Pay Per Click Ad’s. Hey… that’s as good as being in a top 3 position!

And, it’s not all that different than the days when consumer’s used the yellow pages to find local services. The biggest ads where (and are) listed first, and they receive the vast majority of the calls. People understand that they were paid advertising, and didn’t page back to find the smaller or line ads, because the company didn’t pay for that listing.

So a complete SEO program needs to take in to account three different areas, those being, organic search, local results , and Pay per Click advertising. And it should be designed to take into account the four different methods a person may use to conduct a local search:

Keyword + Suburb

Keyword

Keyword+ Major City

Keyword + zip

Each serves up different results.

Another big advantage of using the Google Ad words program is you can see great traffic statistics for key words that have become unavailable since Google stopped providing this information on many searches.

So to answer the original question, should you be using Pay Per Click?  Yes, but,  Ad words has become increasing difficult for a novice to navigate. It’s easy to waste a lot of money if you are not trained and familiar with keyword types (exact match, Phrase match, Broad Match, Negative match and others) as well as the location targeted, quality scores and types of bidding available.

Our suggestion is at least have a Internet Marketing firm who has experience in PPC set up and monitor your ad words (and any other PPC services) for you.  We have lot’s of clients getting strong return on investment using PPC.

Please feel free to call me at 303-500-3053 ext 1 if you want some help.  I may not pick up, as I get several calls a day from this blog, and have lots of other phone calls and meetings to be on or in, but I will call you back! Or feel free to email me as well at mike@myonecall.com

 

 

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Do It Yourself SEO, Internet Marketing, SEO

Google Ad Words Pay Per Click Problems

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Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

It seems like I get a call a month from a client or prospect that have been running pay per click on Google and getting terrible results. Once I look at the campaigns I consistently see the following three BIG problems.

First. So far this year with only one exception, the campaign is set up using broad match keywords.

Google gives you 4 options of the way you can run your keywords.  Here is their explanation:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You can set each search-targeted keyword to have one of those four settings. To use a keyword matching option, just add the appropriate punctuation to your keyword:

  1. Broad match: keyword
    Allows your ad to show on similar phrases and relevant variations
    (The broad match modifier may also be used to further refine your broad keyword matches: +keyword.)
  1. Phrase match: “keyword”
    Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase
  1. Exact match: [keyword]
    Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively
  1. Negative match: -keyword
    Ensures your ad doesn’t show for any search that includes that term

With some options, you’ll enjoy more ad impressions, clicks, and conversions; with others, you’ll get fewer impressions and more narrow targeting. By applying the appropriate matching options to your keywords, you can best meet your ROI goals.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So as an example, I have seen a House painter show up in the search Basement Finishing. Why?  Because they are using Broad Match, and when someone searches Basement Painting, they have “painting” as a broad match keyword.  You can imagine how many searches the ad shows up for that have little or no relevance to house painting.

The natural thought is, so what, if no one clicks on the ad under a non relevant keyword, it doesn’t cost you a thing. Well…. Wrong.  Your keywords quality score, which I will blog on latter, is lowered when your ads click through rate (number of times the ad is cliced on divided by the number of times the ad is served)  and the lower your quality score, the more your bid will need to be to get higher placement.

So… use phrase and exact match!

Two. I also see the client or prospect has added all of their keywords under on ad group and possible one ad.

Your keywords should be divided into very specific groups, where the keyword matches the ad you use for that ad group.

Using house painting again,  here is  a brief example.  You should have diiferent ads for each of these and the ads should use the exact keywords in it.

House painting

House painter

Exterior House painting

Painting contractor

In a perfect world you might see a new ad group and ad for each keyword.  Lot’s of work, but well worth it. Your cost will be lower and your conversion rate will be higher.

Three: Scheduling.  Your product or Service has peak days and times that prospects will look for it on the Internet. You know what these are, just track back to when prospects call you the most.  When was that last time someone called you on a Saturday?  For home improvement companies, Mondays and Tuesdays are peak, and Friday and Saturday (generally) are dead.  Why show your ad on day’s no one is really looking?  Instead, up your bids on the peak days and lower your bids on off days and hours.

And I do need to mention a 4th. Geo Targeting!  Google has great options for you to serve your ad just in the cites you want, or a specific radius around your business.  Don’t advertise across n entire metro area, if in reality you are not going to get sales more than 15 miles (or 7 or whatever) from your business.  The natural tendency of customers is to have a preference for a company closer to them, no matter what you sell.

I will go into some other areas and more detail on future blogs.  Pay attention to these 4 areas in an account when you set up an Ad Words campaign.  We do offer very affordable PPC management and set up, so if you just don’t want to go through the learning curve, and need to see better results, call us!

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Denver SEO, SEO

Google Geo-Targeting Problems

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State highways in Colorado
Image via Wikipedia

Google Geo Targeting is tricky, here is why.

If you are using Geo-Targeting on a Pay per click campaign, and have a very specific part of a metro area you want you ads to run in you assume the geo-targeting will show your ads for the searchers from that area.  Well, maybe, and maybe not.

In our experience, (mostly my own), Google decides where the searcher is based on the searched ISP’s point of presence., or node, or what ever you want to call it.  So when I search from my home in Lafayette Colorado, Google thinks I am in Sherrelwood Colorado, which I have never heard of, but according to the map Google serves up, is about 8 miles south west of my actual location. As a crow flies, you would need to fly over two cities before you landed in Sherrelwood.

So… I assume that this is true for most searches, and that most seachers are getting results based on not their local information, but thier ISPs nodes (or wire centers or ???) location.

That also has BIG implications for Local SEO.

Now I use comcast as my ISP.  Comcast is the largest ISP so I can assume that lot’s of potential prospects have the same issue. If I want my business or client to show up in Lafayette CO.  on the maps, I need to get a Sherrelwwod address?

You can see how messy this is. Might have been one of the reasons Google decided to combine organic and Google places results back in October.

So my long winded point is, if you are doing PPC,  don’t be too precise with your google geo-targeting or you may miss your entire market, and end up selling in Sherrelwood, a nice place I am sure, even if as a native of Denver I have never heard of it.

 

Anyone with any more information please let me know!

 

Here is some info from Google help on setting your location:

Automatically detected location

To provide you with the most relevant results, Google attempts to automatically detect your location and customize results based on that detected location. A location that’s labeled “Auto-detected” is chosen based on the following factors:

  • Your IP address .
  • Google Toolbar’s My Location feature. If you have Google Toolbar installed and have the My Location feature enabled, your approximate location (if detected) will be used to customize your search results. If you don’t want Toolbar to attempt to determine your approximate location, you can turn off My Location

 

 

 

 

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Denver SEO, SEO

SEO In Denver and PPC

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We get asked about using pay per click by our search engine optimization clients pretty often.  In most cases they are asking specifically about Google pay per click services.

Google Appliance as shown at RSA Expo 2008 in ...
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We have been running ad words campaigns for 7 years for clients and our own services and have found them to be effective in generating new clients.

Like all advertising and marketing, you need a well thought out program. With Google’s ad words program you have choices on where to advertise (Geo location specific)  who to advertise to (demographic choices) when to advertise (Day’s, times), Daily budget  and what key words to focus on.

We suggest (as does Google) that you start with a very narrow group of keywords, and once you get enough history make changes and add more.

It’s very important that the ad you write match closely to the keywords you choose,  and the landing page it is sent to needs to match as well.  All of these factor into what you end up paying per click. It’s called a quality score, and you can read more about Google quality score here.

One of the best parts to PPC is you can “cover all your bases”  on possible searched for your service or product.  A good SEO campaign can get you well ranked for some keywords, but rarely will it give your site visibility on many of the secondary terms. That’s where PPC services come in. Or while you are in the process of search engine optimization.

See our services on our Denver SEO site

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