When you really think about it, there are two places where a website design can really fail to perform:
- The site isn’t getting enough traffic or
- The site isn’t converting its traffic into sales.
Solve those two issues and you’ll have a winner. Okay. Maybe it’s not that easy, but it’s true. If you look at your slumping website sales and ask yourself which problem you have, the answer is definitely in one of those two problems.
Maybe you’re thinking you don’t know which one it is. In fact, you could have a problem with both. Let’s say you get very little traffic and the visitors you do get never buy from you. You have an issue with both.
How to determine how many visitors you’re getting:
If you’re not sure how much traffic you’re getting, then you may need to install tracking software like Google Analytics. It’s free and boy is it useful. All you do is copy a few lines of code that Google gives you and paste it into your website template. Voila. You now have a sophisticated tracking system that will begin looking at your website and will tell you how many people visit everyday, how long they stay, where they came from, which pages they visited, which keywords they used to search for your site and more. It’s a treasure-trove full of goodies that can help you to modify your site to appeal to your audience.
Set up a Google Analytics account.
How to calculate your website’s conversion rate:
Once you know how many people your site is getting every month, you then need to count how many sales you had last month. Divide the number of sales by the number of visitors and you have the conversion rate. For example, if you had 100 visitors last month and made 1 sale, you have a 1% conversion rate. If you had 100 visitors and 4 sales, that’s a 25% conversion rate. Frankly, if your conversion rate is less than 1%, you should probably start looking at ways to increase your conversion rate.
This guide will focus solely on how to get more traffic and how to increase conversion rates. We’ll tackle the traffic issue starting next Wednesday. Until then, set up your analytics account and calculate your conversion rates.
How to get more traffic
There are many ways to get more traffic to your site but hands down, Google is the number one driver of traffic on the Web. You can pay to have your ads listed at the top of the Google search results or you can optimize your website to get your site ranked in the free organic listings. Or, you can even create a Google Places page to help your site be found on the map. Over the next few months, we’ll cover each of those parts of the Google results and how to get your site into them.
Today, we’re going to begin discussing Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short.
So what is SEO? It’s the process of making your site search-engine friendly. There are a number of things that search engines look at when determining which sites to rank at the top of their results and which ones to relegate to the bottom. In fact, there are more than 200 factors but some of them are more important than others. Some things carry a lot of weight and can help you to move up significantly while other factors may only have a small effect.
No matter which factors you’re considering, the most important thing to pay attention to is the keyword research. You see, Google will actually tell you which phrases people are using in their searches. You can easily determine which phrases are popular and which ones are not. Plus, you can discover new phrases that you may never have thought of.
Keyword selection is so important because if the phrases that people are searching for on Google don’t appear in your site, then your site won’t appear in the search results. Doesn’t that make sense? If someone is looking for “website design companies” Google is going to look into their database of all of the sites in the world that they have read through and see which ones mention “website design companies.” The sites that don’t mention that phrase are obviously discarded and only the ones that have that phrase are returned. The trouble is, there are millions of sites in the world that contain that phrase. Somebody is going to be at the top of the pile and someone is going to be stuck at the bottom.
So how does Google decide who to place at the top? That’s where the 200 factors come into play. Their primarily concerned with providing relevant results. Remember about 10 years ago when Google first came onto the scene and all of the results came back with questionable results. I recall searching for something like “restaurants” and the results would come back with lots of sites that you wouldn’t want your kids to see. What happened to the restaurant sites? There were mixed in there. It’s just that the other sneaky webmasters were really good at cheating their way into the listings. Google had to clamp down. They had to find a way to clean up the results and provide only sites that were legitimate restaurants. Otherwise, people would have quit using Google. Imagine where we’d be today if everyone had switched to Ask Jeeves because of the questionable results. The world would be a very different place if Google hadn’t become what it is today.
So how did they clean up the results? Basically, they made their mathematical formula that they use to rank site much more complicated. This algorithm used to be fairly simple. Initially, they’d look to see if your site had the right words in it. If it did, they’d then see who mentioned the words the most. That guy would win and be at the top. But how easy is that to cheat the system? Just add repetition. Webmasters stooped to low levels. It was common to do things like putting white text on a white background. That way you could fill the site with your keyword phrase without having your readers see all of that garbage. The problem with this simple method was that it was so easy to cheat. You could have a website with questionable content on it and fill the background with innocent phrases like “restaurants.” That would make Google think that the site was all about restaurants when in fact, it was about something much worse.
That practice was soon banned and the sites that engaged in those so-called “black hat” techniques found themselves at the bottom of the pile, if not completely kicked out of the results.
Since 2000, we’ve seen a number of big updates to Google’s algorithm. Each time the sneaky webmaster figure out a way to cheat the system, Google stays one step ahead by changing the rules. The sites that may have ranked well before the change may fall dozens of pages. And those that weren’t even found might be at the top overnight.
That’s a brief history of where we’ve been and why today we have so many factors to pay attention to. Every time there’s an update, the rules get tougher and tougher and ultimately, there are more factors that Google pays attention to. As they refine their algorithm, the process of search engine optimization gets more difficult.
Selecting the right keywords for your website
Keyword selection is vital because you need to optimize your site for the actual phrases that people are searching for. If you optimize for a phrase that gets very few searches each month, all of your efforts may be fruitless. What good would it do to rank #1 for a phrase that no one searches for. I see that all the time. People come to us, proud of the fact that they rank #1 for their company name. Would you rather rank for your company name the type of product you sell? Would you rather rank well for “The Reader’s Nook” which might get 5 searches a month, or for something like “book stores” which might get 8 million searches a month? Of course you’re thinking the later would be nice. But what about relevancy? If you primarily sell classic used books, ranking well for “book stores” may get tons of people to your site who leave right away because they’re looking for the newest releases. On the other hand, if you ranked well for something like “used book stores” you might get fewer people to your site but chances are the people that hit your site would be more likely to buy. Does it really matter if you get 1000 people a day to your site or 10 people a day, if you make 10 sales either way? Obviously it wouldn’t make any difference. However, it might be a lot more expensive to drive 1000 people to your site than just 10 highly-targeted people. That can make a huge difference in your margins.
So when you’re evaluating your keywords, you’ll want to not only look at search volume but also at relevancy. But it doesn’t stop there, you should also consider whether or not the phrases that you’re considering might have a double meaning. Take the word “Beetles” for instance. I bet hundreds of thousands of people are searching for that phrase each month. But how can you tell how many are looking for the VW Beetle vs. how many are looking for The Beetles vs. how many are looking for the insect. You can’t tell. Google gives some great insight into what people are looking for, but they can’t tap into those people’s minds and tell you what their intent was when they made the search. Google is pretty amazing but they can’t read our minds, yet. So you have to think about the searcher’s intent.
Optimizing your page titles
While they may seem insignificant, they’re powerful little guys and play a big role in SEO. The title of the page is found at the very top of your browser window. I’m talking about the bar at the very top, above your address bar, up by the red “x” where you can close out window. Can you picture that? All too often people use something like “Welcome to abc.com” as their title tag. Unfortunately, the title is one of the top factors that Google looks at on your site to determine what it’s about. If you want to rank well for the word “welcome” then by all means, use that word in your title. Otherwise, it would make more sense to use one of the keyword phrases that you selected last week in your keyword research phrase. A much better title would be something like “Fishing Tackle in Bozeman, Montana.” That’s going to help people searching for that phrase find your site. Otherwise, only people who know your website address will find your site. And those people can already find it.
The title is much more important than just the line at the top of the browser. It’s truly one of the factors that Google places the most weight upon when deciding what your site is all about. Plus, it gets better. The title tag is displayed in Google’s search results. When you look at the results page, you’ll see each listing has a blue line of text, 2 black lines of text and the green website address. The blue line of text is pulled from your title. You essentially have the ability to write the headline for your 4-line advertisement on Google. Write a compelling headline and you stand a much better chance of getting the click when your site appears in the list. In fact, you might be the second-ranked site but actually get the viewer to click through to your site if you have a more compelling headline or title.
Think back to the example of the title that read “Welcome to abc.com.” Now imagine, would you click on a listing on Google that said that? Or would you be more inclined to click on something that looks like what you’re searching for, like “Fishing Tackle in Bozeman, Montana.”
One more note related to the titles and Google’s search results. Have you ever noticed how some of the words on the Google search results page are bolded? They bold the words that match words used in your search. So if you searched for “Fly Fishing Gear in Bozeman” and the title read “Fishing Tackle in Bozeman, Montana” Google would bold “Fishing” and “Bozeman” because both of those words we found in the title and in your search. When a word is bolded, it draws even more attention to it so you stand an even better chance of getting the click when you have bolded words. As you can imagine, a poorly-written title that welcomes you to the site will likely never get any bolded words because who would search for something like “Welcome?”
So there you have it. The title tag is a simple little element within your site but don’t overlook it. While it may be small, it’s an important part that can not only determine how well you rank, it can also seriously influence how many clicks your listing gets.
Describe your content with meta descriptions
Despite what you may have heard, the description tag is a vital part of SEO. You may have heard that Google doesn’t place a lot of emphasis on the description tag when they’re deciding how to rank a site in their results. That’s actually true. It plays a very small role. But it’s still very important. Why? Because just like the title tag, the description tag is used in your Google listing.
When you search for something on Google, you get a page of results that each have a big blue headline, 2 lines of black text and the green website address. The title is pulled from your site for the blue headline and the description is pulled in, used for the 2-line description found in black. Essentially, you have the ability to control what your listing looks like, as long as you make sure that your pages each have a title and description. If you neglect to have a title, it’s likely that your headline will read, “Untitled.” When was the last time that you clicked on a Google listing that said, “Untitled?” Does that look like something you’d want to learn more about? I don’t think so.
You have to do your very best to make sure that your listing is as attractive as possible. It’s a ton of work to get your listing on the first page but if you fail to get the click, you might as well have been on page 10.
While there’s little emphasis placed on the description tag in terms of how your site will be ranked on Google, it can’t hurt to include your keyword phrases in your description, if only because you stand a chance of getting keywords bolded in your Google listing. If your description or title contain the same words that the user entered into their search, Google will help draw attention to your listing by bolding the words that match. That often-overlooked factor can seriously increase your listings click through rate. If you get twice as many people to click on your listing because it has bolded words, that could double your annual sales. How about them apples?
Myths about meta descriptions
There are a lot of myths about meta tags. Ask 10 people who think they know a thing or two about SEO and most people will tell you that the meta keywords are really important. It’s simply not true. They used to be very important. From the beginning, Google used the meta keywords as a means to quickly understand what your site is about. Create a long list of everything you’d ever want to be found for and they’d rank you. It was pretty easy to cheat though. The meta keywords were abused and eventually, Google decided to not use the meta keywords as a ranking factor.
These days, Google still looks at your meta keywords, however, they use them only to punish you if you abuse them. It’s called meta keyword spamming. We see it all the time. People fill their meta keywords with a long list of words. This old-school means of ranking simply doesn’t work any longer.
When Google started punishing sites for wrongly using the meta keywords, they made an example with the BMW website. The bright folks at BMW thought that they could really ramp up their traffic by sneaking “Carmen Electra” into their meta keywords. What harm could that do? They figured that a ton of people were looking for photos of Carmen Electra every month so why not try and trick Google into thinking that their site was about Carmen Electra. Boy did that backfire. Google looked at the meta keywords, saw the reference to Carmen Electra and then verified it to see if that phrase appeared anywhere within the page. When they failed to find that phrase in the site, Google slapped BMW on the wrist by kicking them totally off of Google for 30 days. The same happened with Ricoh copiers.
So you might be thinking, we’re never pull a stunt like that. Think again. You’re probably in jeopardy of being slapped on the wrist yourself. Here’s what I mean. If you have a long list of keywords in your meta tags, it’s likely that at least one of those phrases doesn’t appear within the page. We see it almost every day. It may be innocent, but if you list words in your meta tags that don’t match exactly the same words that appear in your page, you’re essentially doing the same thing as BMW. You have to be careful to not abuse the meta keywords.
So what can you do to avoid this problem? It’s simple. Just delete all of the words from the meta keywords list. Since Google isn’t using them to increase your ranking, they’re only hurting you.
Use your keyword in your headlines
The headline is highly important and shouldn’t be overlooked. Far too many people either don’t use the H1 tag, which is also known as your headline tag, or they waste their headline by filling it with unimportant words, like “Welcome to our Home Page.” Imagine if Google looked at your headline to try and determine what you wanted to be found for. They’d assume that you want to rank when people search for things related to homes. Instead, wouldn’t it be a good idea to include your most important keywords in your headline? It’s not rocket science. Just jump back to the beginning of this series to discover the steps to take when choosing your keywords, and them apply them to your headlines.
One word of caution…
Don’t try and cram them all into one headline. That’s a bad idea.
The headlines, along with your title, are probably the two most important elements that you have control over within your site. When Google realized that many webmasters were cheating the system by manipulating their websites to rank for phrases that they shouldn’t necessarily rank for, they tightened their regulations and began limiting the power you have to rank your own site. They gave that ranking power to the rest of the world. No longer could you fill your site with keywords and hope to rank for those phrases. They had to get live people involved in the decision-making process. How did they do that?
Use those same keywords in your body copy
I can pretty much sum it up in one sentence. Include the same keywords that you used in your headline in your body copy. That’s about all there is to it. Well, there’s a little more. Don’t stuff your content with keywords. If you think that it sounds unnatural, it’s likely that you’re over-doing it. Keep it sounding natural.
Get backlinks to your website’s content
If you think back, do you remember when you used to search Google and most of the listings would lead to questionable websites? You know what I’m talking about. The kind of sites that you’d never want your kids to see? Google had to clamp down and figure out a better way to bring back clean, relevant results. They knew that the sneaky webmasters that were cheating their way into the listings with their questionable sites had to be stopped. So they changed the way they ranked sites. You see, back then, if you hid innocent words in your site, you’d rank for those phrases. It was pretty easy. Put white text on a white background. You could essentially hide hundreds of repetitive keywords in your site and trick people into getting to your site.
Google had to stop it. So they decided to clamp down and take away the power from the webmasters. They essentially gave that power to the live voting public. They realized that they could look at all of the sites around the globe and see which ones linked to a site. Essentially, a great site with great content will attract lots of links. People will naturally link to a site that has great content. If you have a lame site, no one will link to it. If you have a great site, people will link to it. Google, in all their Googly brilliance, figured out a way to evaluate the world’s websites using live people rather than just their computers. They went from irrelevant results filled with questionable content to highly relevant results that are essentially hand-reviewed.
So what’s that mean for you? To start with, fill your site with great content. Great sites attract links which increases your ranking on Google. More links, more traffic. More traffic, more sales. It’s that simple.
A great way to get backlinks for your website
Press releases
Did you know that press releases, long thought to be a great tool for PR can also help you to increase your Google ranking? That’s right. When you write a press release and distribute it around the globe, you stand the chance of having it picked up and posted on blogs and news sites everywhere. If it’s written with SEO in mind, you can include several links in your press releases so that every site that picks it up, naturally builds links back to your site. It’s not rocket science. It’s just intentional link building. Now you don’t have to just sit on your hands hoping that people will link to you site. You can actually do something about it and build links yourself.
Article directories
There are websites called article directories. Essentially, they’re like libraries for articles. Webmasters around the world are hungry for content. They’re too lazy to write their own content so they’ll gladly put your articles on their website. The price? It’s free. You pay nothing. They pay you nothing. It’s a symbiotic relationship. The other webmasters sort through the article directories looking for well-written articles that match the topic of their site. Their only limitation is that they have to leave the article intact, just as you wrote it. That means, you can include an author biography at the end, working your links back to your site into that paragraph. By submitting one article to an article directory, you can typically develop 25-30 links in no time. The only trick is making sure that you use your best keywords in your articles and links so that you’re getting the most bang for your buck.
Blog about your industry or niche
The term “blog” started out a few years ago as a contraction. People had web logs, like an online diary. But over time, we got lazy and pushed the two words together to get the new word, “blog.”
Over the years, in our industry, the word blog has actually become an acronym for Better Listings On Google. And boy is it true. Google loves sites that blog regularly. They eat up new content. And why not? Think about it. Google is in the business of serving ads on sites that participate in their AdSense program. Plus they make oodles of dollars on the ads that are shown in their search results. The more results that they have, the more advertising opportunities they have.
So what should you blog about? First think about your customers. Keep your blogging on-topic. While some people’s blogs are known for their political ranting or comments on the latest news topic, keep your customers in mind. What do they want to learn from you? It’s fine to interject personal insight and even pull back the curtain and tie your personal life into your blog, but be careful about how much you reveal. Just because it’s a blog, doesn’t mean you should reveal any more than you would in a face-to-face conversation.
I know someone who works in our industry. He’s very professional when you meet him in a business setting. On the weekends he really lets loose. That doesn’t seem to affect his business life so it’s not a problem. However, he’s begun video blogging and all of a sudden, there seems to be no professional filter in place. The video blogs are crude and show him screaming and yelling in a bar, clearly drunk. How do you think his customers feel about this disconnect between the person they respect Monday through Friday, now showing their immature side, like a college freshman?
On the other hand, some of the best bloggers in the world keep their audiences engaged by offering the occasional personal tidbit. It’s fine to be transparent. That sort of honesty makes people like you. But keep it professional. And most of all, keep it consistent with the image that you portray to your customers between 9 and 5. If you appear to be professional by day and immature by night, your blog just might do more harm than good.
Two tips when blogging
I previously mentioned that the word, “BLOG” has become an acronym for Better Listings On Google because Google loves fresh, new content. Unfortunately, many people spend hours blogging without seeing any actual results. So why is it that one person can blog and see their site move up in the search engines, while another person sees no change? Here are two potential reasons:
1. Consistency
Google loves to see sites that are continually adding new content. Unfortunately, most sites have a sporadic approach to SEO, social media and marketing in general. Consistency is key here. As a company, we try to blog a couple times a week, if not more. Go back through our posts. See for yourself. Do you think we sit down every day and write something? Nope. Who has the time to squeeze that in every day? Instead, we divide up the chores. We each take a different day. Obviously, my day is Wednesdays. The trouble with blogging is that life gets in the way. The only way to keep on top of your blogging is to block out some time, sit down and write a bunch of posts. While you’re probably reading this post sometime in the late fall, I’m actually writing it today on March 2, 2012. I love the fact that you can pre-write your posts in WordPress, and then schedule them to go live at a specified time. I like to bring my laptop home and write a bunch while I’m relaxing in the evening. Then, when I want to be outside when the weather is nice, I’m not dreading the fact that I have to write my Wednesday post.
2. Intentional use of keywords
I see it all the time. People spend tons of time writing their posts and neglect to incorporate their top keyword phrases. They’ll go off on some tanget about how they spent their weekend and never really get around to their topic that means so much to their customers. For instance, if I were to talk all about what I did last weekend, you’d not only get a little bored hearing about how we cleaned out my daughters’ bedroom Google would also start to think that my blog was all about Disney princesses and Dora. You don’t want to confuse Google like that. On the other hand, if you stay on-topic, Google will start to see the theme of your blog and they’ll think of you the next time someone searches for something related to your company. Note, if you look back through our posts, you’ll see a common theme relating to website design, SEO, graphic design etc. We stick to a pretty narrowly-focused set of topics so that our customers understand what we’re all about and so does Google.
Posting on Social Media
First off, let’s define exactly what social media is. I think there’s a general perception that social media is pretty much Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the like. However, that’s just a narrow section of social media. Sites like Facebook are a subset of social media called social networking. You see, social media encompasses those social networking sites but it also includes file sharing sites, like Youtube and Picassa. But that’s not all, social media includes a all of the sites, and phone apps and iPad apps that help people to connect. Skype, for instance, falls under the umbrella of social media. And don’t forget about Google+. They came onto the scene last year with their stripped-down, cleaned up version of Facebook where people can neatly organize their friends and colleagues into circles, combined with an easy-to-use video conferencing tool like Skype.
So the question is, how can you leverage social media to help drive traffic to your site?
Here’s a great way. My old college roommate is brilliant. Tim can pick up anything and become an expert in no time. He’s an engineer by trade, but he’s also a programmer, web developer, and social media wizard, not to mention he kicks my butt every time we go mountain biking. Anyway, we meet for dinner every month and last time we met he told me about what he’s doing in his spare time, when he’s not working as a project manager. He’s helping one of his friends boost their sales for their little coffee shop in Fort Collins. He’s helped them to tie their social media into their business model in a way that has actually impacted their bottom line. The concept is pretty simple. Post to Facebook that the next 10 people to check in on Facebook at the coffee shop will get a free cup of coffee. Not only do people immediately come in the door, based on the offer, they essentially tell all of their friends, when they check in, that they’re enjoying a cup of coffee at their favorite coffee shop. Think about that for a minute. Ten people check in. They each have 200 friends. That’s 2000 people that just heard about their coffee shop, for the cost of 10 cups of coffee. How much does a pot of coffee cost? $1? $2? Now that’s a great way to utilize social media.
How do we use social media? We like to automate things whenever possible so we have tied our blog to our Twitter page. Every time we one of our blog posts goes live, the title is automatically tweeted. This alerts our 16,000 followers that there’s some great new stuff for them to read. You can see a noticeable spike in traffic when a tweet or a Facebook post alert people that something new has been added.
It’s not difficult to do. In fact, more small businesses handle all of their social media efforts in-house. Just like with any marketing effort, try to keep it consistent. A slow steady pace is always better than a flurry of activity that peters out to nothing.
Pay Per Click (PCP) Advertising
Let’s start with a quick definition in case you’re not familiar with what pay-per-click advertising is. We’re probably all familiar with the Google interface. You know the ads that are in the sidebar? Those are called Google Adwords. They’re the pay-per-click ads. Just as the name implies, the advertiser only pays when someone clicks on the ad. Basically, your ad can show to thousands of people every day but you only pay when someone actually clicks on one of the ads and visits your website. You can pay anywhere from a few cents to nearly a hundred dollars per click, depending on how competitive your industry is. If you’re selling knitted salt and pepper shaker covers, you’re probably not looking at a lot of competitions so you’ll likely pay $.05 per click. On the other hand, if you’re a trial attorney looking to get clients who have mesothelioma you might pay $90 per click. That’s the most competitive keyword phrase on Google because the class action lawsuits can pay the attorneys millions of dollars. It’s worth it to them to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to land a client that can net them a million or more.
Before you make up your mind about whether or not PPC is right for you, we need to talk about some of the benefits and disadvantages of PPC advertising.
Benefits of PPC
PPC Benefit #1: It’s pay for performance. You only pay for the clicks you get. Name another form of advertising where you only pay when someone responds to your ad. Radio? Nope. If your ad runs on the radio but no one ever calls or stops by, you still pay for the spot. TV? Same thing. Yellow pages? If no one ever opens their phone book, you still pay. Newspaper? You’re still paying, even if no one responds. But with pay-per-click advertising, your ad can be displayed to thousands of people and if no one responds, you don’t pay.
PPC Benefit #2: It’s highly targeted. With pay-per-click ads, you choose the search phrases that will trigger your ads. If you’re selling those knitted salt and pepper shakers, you might choose to only have your ads shown to people who are looking for sale and pepper shakers. That way, people who are looking for a new set of tires won’t even see your ad. That way, you’re guaranteed that only the people who are looking for your product will be enticed to click on your ad. Think about how powerful that is for a minute. The guy looking for tires isn’t concerned with salt and pepper shakers at the moment. If he were distracted from his search for tires and decided to click on your ad, the likelihood that he’d buy your sale and pepper shaker covers would be slim. On the other hand, if people who are looking for sale and pepper shakers encounter your ad, and click through to your site, they’re much more likely to become paying clients. Essentially, your conversion rate would be a lot higher. It wouldn’t be worth your advertising dollars to get a low-converting prospect to your site when you could get high-c0nverting prospects for the same price. With the highly-targeted ads, you’re likely to get more sales from fewer people. It’s a rifle approach rather than a shotgun approach.
PPC Benefit #3: It’s pull-advertising rather than push-advertising. Push advertising is what we’re all used to. We’re bombarded on a daily basis with ads. Companies are pushing their ads on us at every turn. From billboards to bus ads to newspapers, radio ads, flyer on your door and coupons under your windshield wiper, we’re hit with hundreds of ads every day. For centuries this has been the common approach to advertising. The idea is to hit you enough times so that you’ll eventually give in.
On the other hand, there are very few forms of pull-advertising. The difference is that people are looking for your product and you present your ad at the moment that they’re interested. They’re looking and you just pull them in. With push-advertising, you’re just hoping to break through the clutter and interrupt your customers’ daily lives long enough to get your ad to sink in. The trouble is, it’s tough to get your ad to sink in when busy people are more concerned with things like what to make for dinner or who’s picking up Bobby from soccer practice. It’s commonly known in the industry that you normally have to show your ad to someone 7 times before they even notice it. With pull-advertising, you might find that people only need to see your ad once to notice it. The difference is, when they’re looking for your product or service, they’re actively engaged and are no longer hesitant to accept your marketing message. When they’re being pressured with push-advertising, they’re in a defensive posture, trying to keep up a wall between you and themselves. There are really only two forms of pull-advertising that I know of. The yellow pages and search engines. Both are designed to show the customer with relevant advertisements at the moment when they’re looking for something. When you need a plumber, some people still turn to the yellow pages to look up a phone number. They turn to “P” for plumbers and low and behold, there are a bunch of advertisements for plumbers. At any other point, the customer would be in a defensive posture, unwilling to learn about your plumbing service. However, this morning, the toilet backed up and any plumber’s ad would be welcomed. It’s all about timing.
PPC Benefit #4: There are no contracts . Unlike every other form of advertising, you’re not obligated to continue advertising any longer than you want. If you want to try it out for a few minutes, go ahead. Seriously, you don’t have to sign up and keep using it. If you don’t like it, you can just pause the campaign.
PPC Benefit #5: You can spend as much or as little as you want. With Google Adwords, you can set your budget and choose how much you want to spend every day. Some people want to spend $5 a day, others spend $5000 a day. It’s up to you. All you have to do it specify in your account how much you can afford. If you only want to spend $5 a day, your ads will show until your ad budget is exhausted and then they’ll be removed until the next day. Normally, all of the ads that were removed go live again the next day at midnight, but here’s a little tip. You can delay your ads and have them go live at any point. The benefit of this is amazing because all of your competitors may have exhausted their ad budgets by 2:00 in the afternoon just when your ads are set to go live. That way, your ads will be the only ones that are on the page.
Disadvantages of PPC
PPC Drawback #1: The costs have gone up over the years. I remember when Google first introduced pay-per-click. It was only a nickel a click. Oh, remember the good old days? These days, I find it difficult to even make a profit because PPC tends to be so expensive. In order to know if PPC is right for you, you have to first know how much margin you have on your products. Let’s say you sell a product for $100. You buy it from China for $50 after all of your costs. You have a $50 margin to work with. Basically, if you’re spending more than $50 on advertising to sell one unit, you’re losing money. When the costs were only $.05, you could drive hundreds of people to your site and still have sufficient profits left. Today, if you’re paying a dollar a click, you might spend $100 to sell your $100 product. Obviously, you can’t keep that up for very long. You have to either tweak your website so that it gets higher conversion rates or you have to minimize your PPC costs. There are many ways to do this.
PPC Drawback #2: Not very many people click on the Google ads any more.
This is one of the biggest problems with PPC. People have simply become immune to the ads. That’s one of the main reasons that Google is constantly changing their interface. It’s like a sign on a building that you pass every day. After a while, you don’t even notice it any more. Google has seen that people have quit clicking on the ads so they are constantly moving them around and have recently started adding them to the bottom of the page too. Also, have you noticed that Google has lightened the pinkish-peach color behind the ads? They used to be pretty obvious but these days, they’re doing everything they can to make them blend in with the other listings so people won’t intentionally ignore them. Obviously, since they’re pay-per-click ads, Google only gets paid if they can convince, (or trick) people into clicking on them.
It’s still pretty obvious that the majority of all people are still clicking on the organic, or free listings on Google and more and more people are using the local search results with the link to the map. As Google has added new features to the page, they’ve essentially hurt themselves because fewer people click on their ads.
PPC Drawback #3: Lower conversion rates. The people who do click on the Google ads, tend to convert at a lower rate than those who click on the organic resorts. Why is this? Think about your own shopping behavior. When you first start shopping for something, you’re likely to be in a research mode. You may not even know what to call the thing that you’re looking for. People usually start with a really broach search. Things like “used cars.” Advertisers tend to want huge amounts of traffic to their sites, so they choose to have their ads show up for generic, broad phrases, like “used cars.” While that may get more people to your site, you’ll likely getting people who are just beginning their used car search. As you progress through your shopping timeline, you’ll probably find a car that catches your eye and eventually start searching for more specific things like “2006 Toyota Tundra.” Progress a little further in your shopping process and you might even narrow it down to “Black 2006 Toyota Tundra.” Not very many advertisers choose to trigger ads for phrases like that. Since only a small handful of people look for something that specific, they figure that it’s not worth it. Unfortunately, the advertiser that just goes for the big fish with a big phrase like “used cars” winds up paying a lot more, because the phrase is competitive, they also find that they’re just helping educate car buyers who will eventually move on to another site for their purchase.
How can you avoid this scenario? Be specific. Don’t even waste your time on the broad phrases. They’re just not worth your money.