I recommend reading our article on value propositions first so that this piece will make more sense.
The concept SEEMS simple enough. I’m a smart person you say; surely there is no reason why I should hire an expensive agency to manage my Google Adwords account. I will just figure this out for myself.
There is this saying about life. “The more you know: the less you realize you know.” The same is true for Google Adwords. It’s easy to blow several hundred dollars on a homemade campaign and think you did well getting three calls. You go and do a search on Google and notice your competitors at the top and wonder to yourself: “how do they afford to do this and not go broke?”
Maybe you have hired an SEO firm before with limited or non existent results. At the end of the day however: chances are you are going to need to get professional help to properly set up and optimize your account. Here are some of the things you will need to know in order to choose the right company. If these items never even come up in the opening conversations you may be going down a blind alley.
FIRST: Should You Even Consider Using Adwords and How Much Cash Do You Need?
A properly set up and run Adwords Campaign can give you the shot of growth money and action you need to move to the next level in your business.
There is the initial account setup and then ongoing optimization – Cost: $450 and up. Landing page design and testing? $1200. Daily click budget? (This money goes to Google.) $10 and up per day.
What About Organic SEO? Isn’t that free?
There is a lot more of an unknown factor with “free” organic SEO in terms of real world timeframe and cost. In the long run organic traffic is free but don’t stake your near term grown on organic search results. Winning at the organic game is a function of how competitive (and lucrative) your niche is and how much your competition is spending to dominate these results. Any sudden effort to move to the top in the organic results may be seen as spammy by Google and result in demotion of your website. Winning here requires a solid long term content strategy to create video and articles containing the exact information that answers the questions your ideal audience will be typing into Google.
Move away from Generic Search Terms towards targeted Specialized Traffic.
Generic search terms are the most obvious terms and also the most expensive. Many of the website visitors who are typing in general the generalized search terms such as “psychologist” are going through and clicking ALL the paid ads. You may even get excited when they call you but these callers are not be at the point of making a decision. This traffic is called “Top of the Funnel” meaning that often they are only doing preliminary research.
People who are typing in specific searches such as “help with anxiety issues” are more profitable visitors. Specialized searches have far lower volume and lower cost per click but are often more motivated.
Let’s do some math here:
Option A: General search term 1: Get’s 5000 Searches Per Month. The brand leaders with deep pockets are bidding $5 per click for these terms. Cost if you get 5000 clicks: $25,000
Option B: We build a list of 500 specialized search terms averaging 10 searches per month. The typical bid is fifty cents. Here we still have 5000 searches to work with. Cost for 5000 clicks: $2500
Niche Keywords>Targeted Ad Groups>Niche Landing Pages
So you have found an Adwords partner who is willing to take the time to understand your business and the needs of your ideal customers. They have the necessary skills to generate comprehensive lists of keywords and you have gone through and pruned the irrelevant terms out of the list. You and your Adwords partner have created “negative” keyword lists that have no value for you and you do NOT want triggered by your ads.
We are looking for search terms that represent the needs our typical clients are seeking to resolve or fulfill.
Next you group these terms by relevancy (10-20 terms per ad group) and write ads for each group that employ the N.O.S.E. strategy we mentioned in our other article. At this point you are effectively articulating their need and setting the expectation for what they will find when they click on your ad.
The landing page they visit should be specifically crafted to follow through on the concept established in the ad they clicked on. All the critical elements including your method of contact and the call to action must be located “above the fold.” This concept comes from the old Newspaper business where people would read the headlines through the window of the Newspaper box. They were unable to view what was “below the fold” without purchasing the newspaper.
We advocate structuring the upper part of the page with a value proposition that matches the expectation set in the ad. The lower portion of the page can feature well written content that can be repeated on different landing pages. With our WordPress design it is easy to generate new landing pages and change the elements to incorporate the value messages that match the expectation.
If the message matches well: we have seen clients bypass ample other provider-options and drive two hours to visit the recommended provider. Most other marketers follow a very generalized approach and it is not clear that solutions offered will fit their needs.
The Google Quality Score:
If all of these stages line up and the actual search terms are present in the ad headline you will be awarded a higher quality score by Google. This is based on their fundamental brand goal of providing the public with the specific search results they are actually looking for. If these elements are not in sync you may be charged 4 times the cost per click.
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