Forum

[ddenby1]

I am working with a campaign in the Information Technology industry. Most of the good keywords are $11.00 - $23.00 per click. The customer is small and is only targeting a 120 mile radius around his city and has a small budget.

Does anyone have a good strategy on how to approach this specific situation? I have a few ideas but would like to see a fresh approach.

 

[newstart]

If your client's sphere of influence is a restricted to a geographical area you should be able to add the region to the keyword so as to restrict or limit the main keyword to the locality of the company you are representing.

Example: Keyword (add city, state or region) Real Estate Sales Los Angeles

Something to that effect should cut down your PPC or CPA advertising costs as it is senesless for the company to rank world-wide for a term if they cannot service a market outside of their geographic area.

The site should be optimized to develop natural ranking over time thereby minimizing the need for paid advertising to acquire traffic. Search engine methods regarding article submissions, web2.0, press releases, forum participation to build backlinks and traffic will help the firm's website rank highly on a local search. In this way, you could completely eliminate the need for paid advertising over time.

Margene

 

[ddenby1]

Thank you for your advice.

This was actually one of my ideas and when I added the city to the end of each keyword, it lowered the price to under $ .10 per click. Fantastic! However, I am still competing with the advertisers who are paying $11.00 - $23.00 per click on the same keywords (without the city name). There happens to be (in some cases) 4-6 pages of advertisers so, my ad is pushed to the last page. Even though my quality score improved, the other competitors are paying so much more they dominate the first page.

I have also tried to incorporate long tailed keywords which has helped the overall CPC.

 

[newstart]

Are there similar keyword phrases that you can use that would pull the same traffic? Sometimes by just opting for another keyword you can get access to the same search engine search activity without fighting toe to toe with the big boys.

Also, if a keyword search is similar not exact a search will produce a result where a website is not optimized for that specific keyword. By creating backlinks for that exact keyword you can outrank the competitive site.

Reverse spy on your top competitors to determine their weaknesses along with all the keywords they are using. Then adjust your site to avoid the other site's inadeguacies. If the other sites are relying totally on paid advertising their website along with backlinks may be quite lacking.

A free software you can use to spy on your competition is SEO Quake. It may take you a while to learn the in and outs of spying on your competition. The software is simple however the overall spy techniques require time to master.

I would suggest Matt Carter's Backlink Blueprint course as well as several of the videos available on AffilorRama.

Margene Smith

 

[lizatailor23]

I'm seeing the same thing. It's probably to be expected with the huge increase in clicks coming from all the new GoTo partner sites. Most of my clients faced a decision whether to be in the game at the top, but only for part of the month, or to lower the bid and have a steady presence.

 

[AndyBlack]

Monitor and try and improve your keyword quality scores and campaign impression shares.

Make sure you report and analyse by Google Search, Search Partners, and Display Network.

Use exact and modified broad match, and don't bother with phrase and broad.

Make sure you change Advanced Location targeting to exclude "search intent".

Check the Search Term report to find out how people are searching. If you get a sniff that people are searching by, say, zipcode, then do EVERY zipcode that the business covers.

One keyword per adgroup... (of maybe the exact and modified broad in the same adgroup).

 

[marsiayw]

You should add your local address with acount. It will help to boost up your campaign for the exact region.

I am sure it will help you out.

 

[mbeelow]

You should try ad extensions, specifically Google Maps extension for your ads. It will help get more clicks, achieve better CTR and finally lower the bids. Here's a guide on setting up various ad extensions: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2011/ ... ions-guide

 

[yulia]

The best way to get quality targeted traffic is to get targeted keywords, long tail keywords work very nice.
And geo targeted even better. What "newstart" advised earlier is the best way to approach this issue.
you may get less traffic, but it definitely will be more targeted and will increase your conversion ratio.

 

[macdalangin]

You may research for competitor ads to get ideas on which keywords your competitors are using for their campaigns. However, if you are looking for free tools that gives you information on your competitor's ads or same tools that search engines provide, you may not see any. If you are interested on getting more information about this, you may avail paid tools that show your competitor’s keywords, their bids, their text ads, and many more.

Exploring keyword variations is also helpful. Try to pick keywords that are not too generic, instead choose the long tail keywords or key phrases that "sells". In addition to long tail keywords, try to also attach the location (if possible) to your keywords. For more possible keywords and keywords variation, you may use Google Keyword Tool.

Also, you may read more about searching for good, competitive keywords here- http://www.affilorama.com/market-research/doing-keyword-research