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Google AdSense & "Search Optimization"
Thanatos
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, my firm is considering doing some advertising on the internet. Google AdSense seems to be the most popular way of doing it, but we're a small, geographically-centered firm, and we don't have a tremendous amount of money to spend on advertising. Are we likely to see anything out of a maximum spending limit of, say, $3 a day? Or is that just going to be way too small to see any serious results?
And what about "search optimization" services? I've gotten some phone calls from a a few places offering them, but it just sounds kinda skeevy, and like they're trying to simply sell us some keywords. Are they for real, or are they pretty much just scammers?
And what about "search optimization" services? I've gotten some phone calls from a a few places offering them, but it just sounds kinda skeevy, and like they're trying to simply sell us some keywords. Are they for real, or are they pretty much just scammers?
Thanatos on
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But, there are a lot of factors going into SEO. Links to other sites, keywords, keyword frequency, etc.
If your company has a webmaster, get them a copy of WebCEO and google up general SEO practices, and let them go to town. It's really not a difficult process for anyone to learn how to SEO a site, as long as they have a general understanding of coding practices.
And it saves you the 10 grand or whatever some of the SEO firms like to charge. Though, some of them do guarantee you a certain spot on google, so it's really up to how much your firm wants to spend to gain rank in the search engines. If they can guarantee a certain pagerank within a certain amount of time in writing, it might be worth looking into.
With Google Adwords you can specify a geographic area for your ads to appear in. You only pay for the ads that get clicked and you set a daily budget so you won't pay more than that amount, averaged out over a week. For example, if you set a budget of $3/day ($21/week), you won't spend more than the $21 that week, though some days may be more than $3 and some may be less.
One other thing to keep in mind about Adwords is that you tell Google how much you're willing to pay for each click that you get. The amount you're willing to pay is then compared to what other people are willing to pay for the same keyword and the people willing to pay the most get better placement. But, local keywords like "Portland Taxidermy" don't have a lot of competition so the price per click is usually pretty reasonable.
There are two big things that factor into how much Google things you should pay per click besides how much your competition is bidding. The first is your click through rate, meaning how many times people click on your ad compared to how often it is shown. The higher the CTR the lower your average click cost. In fact, with a high enough CTR, you can actually get higher placement than someone with a lower CTR, even if they bid more per click than you.
The other way Google determines what you should bid is called Quality Score. Basically, they look at the page you're linking to and they determine how relevant it is to the keyword you're bidding on. So if you're a Portland based taxidermist and your site clearly is about that, you're golden. If you're bidding on Novelty Ice Trays, Google will want you to pay a whole lot more per click. These two factors are nice to know about, but considering the size of this campaign they probably won't play a significant role. But if this works out, you'll want to look into this kind of stuff before you scale up.
Keep in mind that you can also specifically bid on phrase (where the keyword is found in the search in the specific order "Portland Taxidermy") and exact (where the ad is triggered only if the search is [Portland Taxidermy] exactly) as well as the regular broad match (where the ad could be triggered by any search that has both the words "Portland" and "Taxidermy" in it, not matter what order or what other words are also in the search). Don't bid on broad search keywords, that's where you'll waste your money. Focus on the phrase and exact matches to get the most mileage out of your budget.
There's a lot of other stuff that you can research like split testing to see what ads convert best for you. That may be more effort than you want to put into this, and with a really small campaign you can probably get away without doing too much testing, but this is another thing you'll want to research if you end up scaling the campaign.
The last thing I'll mention is that you don't need to waste your money trying to outbid your competition to get the top placement. What you really want is either spot 3 or 4 on the first page of results. The first two places tend to get a lot of "tire kickers" whereas the third and forth spots have a higher chance of actually being buyers.
You're right in that it's probably one of the better services to use. But you're also right in the fact that $3 a day is really going to be incredibly low. Depending on the keywords you're targeting, you might have a CPC of about $1 a click, which will only get you 3 additional visits per day. Less competitive (ie less searched for) keywords might get you a better bang for your buck, but again, $3 a day isn't much to play with. I'd guess you'd get single digits for visits.
First of all not everyone that clicks your ad will want to do anything. Out of thousands of clicks you might get maybe 1% of those people interested if you are lucky. And out of that small group, it's likely no one may buy anything.
The adwords pricing is all going to depend on how competitive your keyword market is and your conversion rate, I've done campaigns where the sweet spot was less than a dime/click, others where it was a few dollars/click.
There there's all the niche stuff: local forums(some have really good deals on ads), newspapers/weeklies, etc