Find Perfect Keywords for Your Residential Service Contracting Business

Over the past few weeks we’ve laid a good foundation for an effective Internet marketing strategy. We’ve discussed the basic elements for search engine marketing including page optimization, best practices for metadata and how to quickly get traffic to your site through paid search marketing (pay per click, or PPC). Today we’re going to talk about how to go about forming that perfect list of keywords for both your website and your PPC campaigns to make sure you’re getting the type of traffic you need and not wasting advertising dollars on traffic that will never convert to dollars.

After you’ve built your PPC ads it’s time to select the search terms you want your ads to be displayed next to. Effective keyword research is essential to ensure your PPC campaigns will be a success. There are a few key points to keep in mind when conducting your research and several ways to determine what your best keywords.

Target – Have a clear idea of what your goals are and what you want to achieve. Do you want to generate leads for kitchen and bath remodeling work for homeowners in a given area or are you targeting rooter work and unstops for commercial locations?

Relevancy – Whatever goals you’ve set for your campaign make sure your keywords (and ad copy) reflect those goals. Keep keyword choices on topic for each ad groups’ goal. Resist the temptation to try to be found for every type of service you offer with a single ad and a huge list of keywords. If the overarching goal for your PPC campaign is to increase leads for all types of service jobs then create ads targeted for each individual type of service and use keywords only relevant to that specific service ad group.

Think Like a Lead – This step goes hand in hand with targeting goals for your PPC campaign as well as their relevancy. Here, it’s important that you use keywords and phrases that your ideal prospect would most likely use to search for the service their needing. Avoid technical jargon or industry lingo used to describe what you do unless that would be the most popular way a potential client might search for the service. If the goal of your ad campaign is to attract leads more in tune with the industry-speak associated with what you’re offering you may consider running a separate ad campaign using those specific search phrases as your keywords

Get Specific – Make sure keywords are worth the effort. Too little volume for your chosen keywords will make a campaign seem ineffective, when it’s actually the keyword choices that have limited the campaign’s success. You want to narrow your keyword focus enough to make sure you're only attracting the right type of visitor to your site, but an ad that has a keyword list full of search terms that absolutely no one is searching for will bring you absolutely no traffic or sales!

Get Negative – All PPC services I’ve dealt with have allow you to supply a list of negative keywords to help filter out traffic that you don’t want coming to your site. For example, at ShuBee we sell a lot of shoe covers and have several ad campaigns targeting different variations of that keyword. Unfortunately shoe covers are not specific just to the industries we cater too. There are several different types shoe covers available for cyclists too! I have nothing against cyclists at all, but the odds of a person searching for “Giordana Wintex shoe covers” will find any interest in our ads promoting shoe covers for plumbers. Also, I don’t want to run the risk of depleting my ad budget on clicks from Googlers searching for “women’s high heel shoe covers.” Neither of these search terms match my campaign’s goals nor match up with any of my target audiences, so they’re in my negative keyword list. This is a great way to further refine the focus of the keywords you do want to target.

Check Competitors – Constantly seeing your competition’s ads show but not yours? Use a tool like SEM Rush (http://www.semrush.com) or SpyFu (http://www.spyfu.com) to get a better understanding of what keywords they’re using and possibly uncover some gold nuggets you hadn’t considered!

Still need some help picking out keywords? Luckily there are some great tools available to help make suggestions for you. Google has their own keyword suggestion tool in AdWords to help jumpstart your brainstorming process: (http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). Keep in mind though when using this or any other keyword research tool - no one knows your prospects, advertising goals or market like you do and it's going to take your expertise to put together the most effective keyword list to ensure your PPC campaigns are a success!

Buying Traffic Using Paid Search Marketing

Last issue we discussed how to track and measure online success through the use of analytics. Unless your site has somehow automagically blossomed overnight to the most popular site since Facebook, you’ll likely need to find ways to attract visitors to your online property. Paid search, commonly known as Pay Per Click (PPC) ads are a great way to make this happen.

PPC can be a great lead generation tool for any business and also a good method to to keep your visitors (aka “prospects”) searching online and out of the yellow pages. Most major search engines offer some type of PPC service and it’s up to you to decide which ones you want to try.

The big three in this area currently are Google (AdWords: www.google.com/adwords), Microsoft (Bing: http://adcenter.microsoft.com) and Yahoo! (Yahoo! Search Marketing:http://marketinginfo.yahoo.com - Yahoo! has recently partnered with Microsoft and much of their paid search technologies are powered by the same engines that manage Bing’s PPC).

For this discussion we’re going to focus on AdWords. With AdWords, you set a daily spending budget, design your ads, select the keywords for which you want your ad to display and then bid on each keyword. You can even set specific times of day you’d like your ads to display (know as day splitting) as well as isolate very specific geo targets for your ads. This gives you flexibility to pick and chose exactly when and where your ads will show.

Day splitting and geo-targeting are neat features of any PPC management tool, but the real focus here should be on your keyword selections when designing your ads. It’s important to make sure your keywords aren’t overly broad, but not too narrowly focused as well. This goes back to our discussion metatags from the article “Guide to Getting Found Online.”

For example, “plumber” may be a keyword that is entirely too broad. It’s also likely that many competitors could also be using the same keyword driving the bid prices for good placement for that search term are out of your budget. However, “Seattle plumbing contractor” may have fewer competing ads and a lower front page bid. Using a better key phrase like this will also help ensure your ad is displayed to more targeted crowd which will in turn help improve your click-through and conversion rates (which, let’s face it, conversions are really the goal for all this work, right?).

Where in the search results your ads display is another story entirely. As you set your bidding for each keyword, you may notice Google giving you a notice that your bid is too low to ensure front page placement. This means that with your current bid, your ad could be buried on page 2, 3 or 500 of all the ads competing for that search term and will never to see the light of day, let alone ever get clicked. While this means that your ad isn’t necessarily costing you any money, it’s also not bringing any traffic in to your site. The solution to this is to either raise your bid for that keyword, or find a better keyword or key phrase to target.

If you (or your developers) have set up all your tracking code correctly you should be able to see a breakdown of paid search traffic vs. organic traffic in your analytics. A good rule of thumb is to aim for 75% of your traffic to come from organic search results (meaning your site has been well optimized for the keywords you’re wanting to target) to 25% paid search traffic.

So today we’ve covered the basic strategies for paid search advertising and identified the importance of keywords as search terms. So how do we select the perfect keywords for our PPC ads? Stay tuned…

Using Analytics to Track Everything

In my last article ‘Guide to Getting Found,’ we discussed four steps to create a strong foundation for your business' online presence: building a website; listing your site with only directories and search engines; developing a metatag strategy and the importance of creating content. With these blocks in place we can really start to pump up reach and begin measuring ROI. So today we're going to discuss how the heck to keep up with everything your website is doing for you (which is probably a lot more than you think!) using the basic features available in most analytics packages and later talk about how to begin using you site as an effective sales tool.

Track Everything

One of the beauties of Internet marketing is that every interaction can be tracked clicks. With the right tracking (analytics) devices in place, you can easily tell where your website visitors are coming, learn which pages on your site are the most popular, determine where you lose visitors and even drill down to see where your website visitors are located.

If you don’t have some type of analytics tracking built into your site you won’t have access to any of this information or know where your areas of improvement exist or what your site’s strengths are.

There are several analytics packages available ranging from free to unnaturally expensive (but also equally impressive). When researching your options, make sure that you’re able to drill down to the specific information you need without a lot of hassle. Google has a great solution with their analytics package (www.google.com/analytics). The tool is free (unless you want to upgrade to their new Premium offerings and shell out around $50k/year) and is a breeze to install. There are other “free-mium” options around, such as Clicky (www.getclicky.com), Yahoo! Web Analytics (web.analytics.yahoo.com) and more. To get started with most of these options, you'll be required to set up an account (usually free) with the vendor and install a small snippet of code somewhere on your website.

Google Analytics is by far the most popular and widely used analytics tool available. It’s my choice in tracking since Google offers a slew of other tools that can be used in conjunction with their analytics, and the fact that I can create and share custom reports is a plus too. To monitor your site with their tool, I'd recommend installing the code they supply in a part of your website that will be included with each and every page load. If you only installed the tracking code on your home page, well, that's the only page that will publish any tracking data. Google currently recommends installing their code in a header file of your site between the tags.

Once installed, visit your analytics dashboard a few hours later to see all the glorious data your website has to offer about your visitors! The variety of built-in reports available in whatever analytics package you choose should be a great start in gaining some insights to your website. To gain a good high-level understanding of your website some points of interest would be: total number of unique visitors in a given time frame, overall bounce rate (a bounce by most analytics engines is considered a visitor who enters your website, does nothing else and then leaves), average time on site, average page views and conversions.

Again, this is good high-level data but won’t give you much actionable insight. You can, however, use this data to start establishing benchmarks for your website and SEO/SEM performance. No visitors yet? We'll talk about traffic generators a little bit down the road. Next issue we'll discuss analytics data mining and what to look for beyond basic analytics reports!