I’ve been so busy doing SEO for local businesses here in Albuquerque, I haven’t had much time to work on my own site! But I finally have a couple of basic SEO starter packages for you to choose from. If you have no idea where to begin the process of making your web site bring customers through the door, this is for you. So check it out and of course drop me a line or give me a call if you have any questions! 🙂
I’ll be the first to admit that I have not been a huge fan of Google Adwords lately. Dealing with Google when you have a problem is next to impossible. It also seems like every account has difficulties when you first start it up, namely Google stops showing your ads for no apparent reason, or just wants way too much for a click. However, something just happened that changed my mind a little.
I have a site that ranks #1 in Google for several keyword phrases. The site is about a year old and sells a hard product. Unfortunately, my margin on the products prohibited me from using Adwords to drive traffic so I relied on organic traffic only. The manufacturer recently agreed to fund an Adwords campaign to drive traffic to my site so I thought I’d give it a shot.
I set up the campaign on 4/14. The two highest traffic keywords were costing me .35 & .40 cents per click on the first day, for ads in the number one spot. These are keywords that bring in about 1000 visits per month from organic traffic, resulting in sales of about $4,000.00 per month.
I checked my cost per click today and found out that Google was only charging me .04 & .10 per click for the number one position! I am amazed at getting .04 clicks in the number one spot. I expect this will result in a nice bump in sales.
I attribute the cheap clicks to several factors. Things like relevant keywords, relevant ads, and a relevant landing page all add up. However, I’ve had this combination before and never saw anything this cheap. What was different about this campaign is that I was sending the clicks to a page that ranked #1 in Google for these same keywords!
This illustrates how important the big picture is and why SEO is so necessary to compete in business today. Internet marketing experts tell us that we want to dominate page one in the search results. That means organic rankings, paid results, and video rankings. By owning a highly ranked landing page, this process becomes much more cost effective.
Yesterday a friend showed me a free tool that saves you a lot of time setting up your listing in Google’s Local Business Center. You can dowload the free Google maps tool here.
This tool is very easy to install and use. Here’s what it does for you in a nut shell. It tells you which keywords related to your business will trigger a listing in Google maps withing Google’s universal search. This is a free source of traffic to your website, free is good! When you go to the link above, he has a video that describes the process in detail. He also sells a product that is essentially a course on Google map listings. I’ll try and give you some feedback on that on a later date in case you are interested. After you install the program, there is a link to a video that shows you how to use it. As I said it’s very simple and works well.
In case you not clear about the ways traffic gets to your website, check out my previous post and visit this page on my site that has a picture describing traffic paths to your website.
And of course you should sign up for the free 30 page guide that explains the whole process for getting a good ranking in Google maps with Google’s Local Business Center. That’s over to the right of the page. Did I mention it’s free too! 🙂
I had an opportunity to get out from behind my computer a few days ago and talk with some local business owners about internet marketing. It’s always nice to get some prospective from the trenches, and some fresh air! One thing that caught me a little by surprise was the lack of understanding on exactly how people arrive at their websites.
Just goes to show how too much time behind this monitor can develop into a distorted perception of reality, LOL.
So I decided to make a page with a pretty picture and some explanation on exactly how visitors get to your website. I hope this helps. And of course, if you have any questions, just drop me an email, my email is on the “About SLW” page in the navigation header at the top of the page. I’m almost always sitting here working on getting more traffic to somebody’s site!
I’m not sure what all the implications are just yet, but when I fired up Firefox a couple of days ago it asked me if I wanted to make my location available to location aware web sites. I will have more on this in the future, but it is obviously further evidence that many things are changing for the better when it comes to small and medium sized business trying to attract customers from their local markets.
This is great news for business owners who are struggling with budgets, trying to keep the doors open. If you aren’t marketing with Google maps and local search you better get busy! There is a lot of inertia involved in getting your website to show for your most relevant search terms, but once you get it ranking the traffic is free, can’t beat free advertising!