Web Strategies #21

Cheap Traffic For Your Site With Pay-Per-Click

Pay-Per-Click is a service by which you bid or pay for certain key phrases. Your bid is the amount of money you will pay each time someone finds your listing on a search engine and clicks on that link. They have to visit your site for you to be charged.

Pay-for-click is not fool-proof, and it almost always requires some trial and error. But for the most part it is easy to setup and will help you get targeted traffic to your site cheaply. The key is coming up with the right terms and phrases for your specific product or service.

Here some key points I want you to know:

1. You can choose which countries or geographic areas your ad appears in. This is called Geotracking and is offered by Overture and Google AdWords--ideal of those businesses offering local services or products. I'm thinking here of our clients that offer drama classes locally, window tinting or phone installation.

2. There are a lot of expensive words that everyone is bidding on. But you can bid on cheap targeted words like misspellings and very specific phrases. Like instead of Web design, you bid on "small business Web marketing" or "Web site copy that sells".

3. There are several ways to limit your risk or the amount of money you have committed. When you are starting out you should limit your commitment and carefully manage your conversion rate. You'll want to track how many are clicking through and how many are buying. Both Google AdWords and Overture allow you to budget the amount of money you will be charged. Overture lets you set a monthly limit, Google sets it daily. Once you've gotten enough clicks to meet that limit, your listings will disappear until the next cycle begins, or you authorize more money.

4. For each product or service you sell and each key word you bid on, write a separate ad. This will attract more attention, more clicks and assure those who click through will get a page that talks about what attracted them to your site in the first place.

Coming up with those Search Terms This is the key to any successful Search Engine marketing effort. You want terms that are going to bring good prospects to your site. You are looking for terms that people want to click through to and you want the people who click through to buy, not just kick tires.

We have used Overture and Google AdWords, two of the most popular companies offering the service. Google AdWords only appear in Google, while Overture covers the other major search engines (it's owned by Yahoo!).

Both Google and Overture help you choose your terms by letting you see how many clicks a particular word receives on average and how much others have already bid for those words. For an extra fee, Overture will help you design search terms for your business. Google has an automated system that helps with this by listing the click-numbers and fees for terms that are related to the ones you enter.

Another tool that can help you come up with effective search terms is Word Tracker. Word Tracker is a third- party service that provides click-data on words you enter. It is designed to help you build your search engine results by reinforcing your search terms with popular related terms (and common misspellings!)

Word Tracker also has an interesting daily mailing that lists the 100 most searched-for words that day. They offer a limited free trial, and have daily, weekly, monthly and yearly memberships starting at less than $10. Visit them at www.wordtracker.com.

We always suggest that you ask your current clients (the computer savvy ones in particular) what terms they might use to look for you on the Web. Ideally, you would sit with them while they searched - it is sometimes the third or fourth refinement of a phrase that finally gets them the results they are looking for - and that may be a great phrase for you to use.

[The purpose of having clients do this is they may come up with regular terms for what you do that you wouldn't think of because of your closeness with your own business.]

When starting out expect about an hour to get things set up. After that it's a matter of checking in from time to time and refining your list of terms. Of course, the more time you are willing to spend on this, the more effective it is likely to be. If you are intrigued, you should test it out.

If you have any questions, call 510-527-9920 to talk to Tod or Karen. Or email me to set up a time for consultation.

Almost Everything Communications    510-527-9920    karen@almost-everything.com
627 Evelyn Avenue, Albany, CA 94706