The first thing that you need to do is develop your core list. These are the terms that you believe your customers will use to find products and services like yours. Let’s say you’re a law firm and you focus on divorce law. What do you think people will type in to search for representation. It’s important to picture the buying cycle when coming up with this list. People will search for generic keywords when at the start of the buying cycle and will get more specific when they’re ready to buy. They’ll use keywords including your competitors brand names, specific locations, pricing inquiries, etc. etc.

Right now it’s not important that you get it right. We’re only starting the process of building your pay per click campaign.

So step one is:

1.Write down the top search terms that you can think of that describe your business or service. I suggest keeping this list on a spreadsheet if at all possible — this will make it easier to organize and submit later.

The second step is to expand this list. There are a lot of tools available on the market both free and paid for to help you to develop your keyword list. Try the Google Keyword Suggestion tool. This is highly effective and free (Just do a Google search, you’ll find it). For my clients I analyse their competitors keywords. I find out what is working and what isn’t. I also monitor their activity over the course of the week to see what kind of changes they make. But if you want to do it for yourself, step two is:

2. Use the Google ‘Search Suggestion Tool’ to get an idea of the popularity of each search term and enter this number under a ‘monthly impressions’ column in your spreadsheet. The tool is located here.

When I searched on our example keywords, I found that those search terms (for the local area of Brisbane) were recently searched as follows:

Divorce - 301,000 (scary I know)

But then I had to look at keywords that are more relevant to buyers

Divorce family law - 1,000
Divorce solicitors - 260
Divorce services - 260

I gathered a lot more key phrases than that and all though it doesn’t sound like much, we were able to generate about 5000 worth of relevant searches

The next thing you need to do is to “long tail” your keywords to make them more specific. The good search engines like Google are about relevancy and the more relevant your keywords are in your pay per click campaign, the cheaper it will be to get prime position. Try adding every suburb in your city to the end of each word or phrase, E.g. Divorce services parramatta. Or try using price related additions - Cheap divorce solicitors.

3. Add long-tails to your key phrases such as: cheap, discount, low cost, free, premium, authentic, etc. Check the Search Suggestion Tool to assess the number of searches conducted for those terms in the previous month. Enter the terms and data into your spreadsheet under ‘monthly impressions’.

The purpose of these activities is to generate the longest possible list of relevant search terms possible. Why? Remember, you only pay when someone actually clicks on your message. You pay nothing extra to simply list more keywords. Additionally, the more keywords you have, and the more specific the search phrases are, the more likely that your visitor will be truly interested in your product or service. For example: ‘divorce is a very general search term. Anyone interested in the topic of divorce including other solicitors doing research might search using this term. However, ‘divorce solicitors brisbane’ is a more targeted search term.

4. At this point in the process, you should have a fairly comprehensive list of targeted search terms and phrases. I suggest you sort the terms on your spreadsheet by ‘monthly impressions’ to get a sense of which terms are most popular. These are the terms that can end up costing you the most advertising dollars if you choose to bid for a high ranking.

Congratulations! You have now generated a comprehensive keyword list that will get you ahead of your competitors. This is obviously the first of many steps. It’s important to monitor the results that you’re generating from your investment and tweak the bid amounts to get the best ROI on your pay per click campaigns.

1. Remove all generic keywords - Always avoid using generic keywords (bikes). They’re just to general and not targeted to your market. Focus on using targeted keywords which describe your actual products or service in a rather specific way (bikes for toddlers).
2. Collect all keywords in targeted, related adgroups - most beginners only have one group. It’s imperative that you get specific. The more specific you are the less you’ll spend.
3. Create new ads - Write your pay per click ad with keywords in mind. Use keywords in the ad copy as often as possible, while still keeping it as grammatically correct as possible. Try to include your keywords in the title and description at least once in each. Keywords within your ad copy will appear in bold which will make them more likely to catch the eye of the user. Keywords also improve the relevance of the pay per click ad.
4. Test & Measure - Test different versions of ad copy. Create multiple pay per click ads for the same keywords. Google and other pay per click services will automatically calculate which ad performs better. After a period of testing, you can eliminate the ads that do not perform at the level you want or just keep the best one. This is commonly referred to as A/B split testing. Every industry and niche market is unique and split testing your pay per click ads is the only true way to see what ad copy is most effective for you

There’s definitely more to it than that, I’ll be including more information in future posts. But for now, if you’re a beginner and you’re looking to improve your pay per click results, follow these four steps and you’re on your way.

I recently had a discussion with a client of mine regarding his PPC campaign. Although others in his industry offer services for consumers, his services were tailored for business customers. His concern was that by implementing a Pay Per Click Management Campaign with our company, that he would spend too much of his time sifting through consumer leads. He actually had an excellent point, as although, through good keyword selection, negative keywords, ad text and landing page copy we could weed out some of these useless clicks and leads, it was inevitable that he would receive unwanted clicks.

After testing his initial campaign, his fears were warranted. Between good ad text and landing page copy, we were able to dramatically reduce the wasted time spent on consumer leads that his Diy Adwords efforts were creating. But they were still finding their way through.

The next step was to initiate Google Adwords scheduling. If you want to do this in your own campaign, You can find this option within your AdWords campaign settings. Just click “Edit Campaign Settings” and you will find your “Scheduling and Serving” information. To edit when your ads are displaying, just click on “Edit times and bids.”

You can make several different choices including days of the week, times, etc. As this client is looking to generate business leads, we are only looking for people searching during business hours. Therefore we have selected to run his ads from 5am to 8pm, Monday through Friday. Also, we are not displaying advertisements on the weekend. A screenshot of the setup is below.

It’s as simple as that. We’re still testing the results and it’s only 3 weeks in, but my client can’t recall the last consumer lead he received from his adwords pay per click campaign. He also mentioned that he’s very thankful.

It’s important to note, that if you’re targeting across time zones, then you need to adjust your campaign to suit this. For my client his business was in Sydney, Australia, but he was targeting businesses in Perth, which is a couple of hours difference. Some of my U.S. clients attempting this in their search marketing campaigns need to adjust over 3 or 4 time zones, so please keep this in mind.

I had an old tradesmen come into my office the other day. I told him that we can do our business via phone and email, but he insisted making the trip in and looking me straight in the eye, so that we can talk taipan to taipan. But really he wanted me to justify to him why he should invest in Adwords and SEO services because the Yellow Pages has worked for him for years.

I know that tech gurus for years have been telling people for years that Yellow is the devil. That they’re the old, and search engines are the new.

But I’m going to tell you what I told my now, new client - if it’s working for you, if you’re generating a positive return on investment, then continue to do use it. I think Yellow still has it’s place, and will still be useful for years to come.

I don’t care what you use as long at it works. I help my clients with a multitude of lead generation activities. Most techies will tell you that Google Local Business Centre is the answer to advertising locally. But if you ask me, I’ll tell you that it’s handy, but it’s only one pillar in your partheonon. I help my clients with everything from signage, to shopping centre promotions, to letter box drops, to local publication advertising to target customers within a geographic area.

Yellow Pages does have it’s positives, and one of the big ones is the fact that it has no other use than a directory of suppliers. I use the internet and search engines for a number of purposes. I catch up on news from home, and from the might cats. I do my banking, watch youtube and so on and so forth. Information is so accessible, that it’s easy to think on a whim, “hmmm…. I’d love a pool out back - I wonder how much it would cost.” and then I search a dozen pages looking for a pool supplier brave enough to put up their prices. I clicked a couple of Adwords text ads as well as the top organic listings.

All traffic generated to pool builders websites, but I’m not a qualified lead - I’m a curious george. Where as with Yellow Pages, you only open it when you’re looking to buy something. Over 60% of all inquiries from the Yellow Pages turn into a sale. If my clients were getting those statistics from clicks, I’d be a very rich man… which I’m not.

For now, Yellow has another advantage over the internet… it’s customer type. Young people are using the internet. Yes the older generations are rapidly catching up, but until they do, the book, the habit, the same thing they’ve been using for years, the tried and true method is what most will turn to.

And the older generation, empty nesters, grey nomads, etc. through sheer weight of years have more accumulated wealth (on average) to dispose of.

So it definitely does have it’s advantages.

But it is getting harder to generate a return on investment. The price has gone up and the readership is well down. A half page ad for some sections is pushing $30K. If your GP is only 30%, you’ll need to generation around $100,000 in business, just to recoup your investment - that’s before you make a cent of gross profit. (keeping in mind that 30% is on the lower scale.

If you compare the two (Yellow Pages Book and Yellow Online) with Google Adwords, MSN (NineMSN for Australians) and Yahoo Search Marketing, the search engines figure much more in the positive.

Firstly, you only pay for the traffic you receive and you can work towards a pay per lead arrangement. Whereas with other two, it’s cash up front, with the book, you pay in July and the book doesn’t come out until October. The same can be said for Search Engine Optimisation, but I know our bill comes in stages, and the fact is that you don’t have to pay anyone (we just make it quicker and easier).

Pay per click marketing is instant. Set up your campaign, swipe your card and you’re up and running. Yellow goes through reps either on the phone or in person which is great for the less technically minded, but if I want to make a change to my premium listing ad online, I have to call them, email them, then wait two weeks, which I still pay for with an underperforming ad.

In the book, it’s a full year’s test - with pay per click, it can be as short as a week.

However if you read my article on improving yellow pages results, you’ll see that there is definitely a lot that you can do to generate more leads with less dollars.

Search Engines Vs. Yellow Pages statistics - I couldn’t find much on the net with credibility. I saw one tech hero (the name for people trained in technical work like web design that profess to be a marketing guru) site with a big graph, but it failed to reveal it’s sources. I found another that compared Yellow costs with website costs, but the costs for the website were skewed to the positive. There was no mention of the costs for SEO. Even if you do it yourself it costs time which equals money. And there was no allowance for adwords or pay per click costs. I have one client spending well above $25,000 per year on Google Adwords alone.

Research was released in October, 2008 that showed the first source used for research of locally based services was search engines at 31%, followed by print yellow pages at 30%. This translated to a 4 point shift from Yellow to online research. But this research may have included Yellow Online - I know I use it. But it was the first time that the print yellow pages has been surpassed for local research information. Consumers still continue to research products online and buy offline. Following the local searches, consumers tended to still contact businesses by phone (39%), visit the business (32%) or contact the business through online means (12%). However it clearly shows the trend towards online research and offline purchasing.

In summary, I like PPC for it’s flexibility and it’s low drain on cash researves without reward. But I like Yellow Pages Advertising as it attracts qualified prospects to your business. I don’t think that you should necessarily choose one over the other, as each business is different. Instead for applicable businesses they both should be used as part of an integrated marketing approach and as long as they continue to generate a positive return on investment, you should continue to use them. At the Fire Dept. we’re about results - we don’t care where they come from as long as our clients are getting them.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…