SEO Strategy | |
The majority of people I discuss online marketing strategies with are completely stuck on SEO (search engine optimization) and I do agree that a high ranking site will deliver lots of traffic and with high traffic naturally come conversions or sales or criminals if you’re a defense attorney. You also get a fair share of tire kickers. The top ranking companies usually have had a high presence in their marketplace for many years and have kept tight control of their online reputation and are highly active with social media (there is much more to it as well). High search engine ranking and quality SEO take time but they are extremely important and every company should carry an SEO budget each year. With that said, as you build your marketplace presence and reputation earning that high search engine rank there are also some very effective ways to draw quality, high converting traffic. I have spent many years in sales and one of the most valuable lessons I have learned is to be able to identify a qualified lead from a waste of time. My experience with sales is you are either near starvation or flush with money and the difference for me was qualifying leads. Regardless of the industry, focusing your time in the most productive areas has the same effect. Planning your CampaignThis is the exact same approach to take when planning a marketing campaign. You need to understand how to focus your ad spend to maximize the return. See the spreadsheet printouts of a PPC marketing campaign I started on the 13th of this month to promote my new site to the right here. It ran in ME and Portsmouth NH only. This report reflects what I call an ad variation test and I capped the max ad spend per day to only $15.00! Think of it like a stop loss. If my keywords were getting tons of clicks but no conversions I had minimal risk. I have changed the max ad spend to a higher figure. Once refined many campaigns don’t have a max. This campaign performed quite well and is a good illustration of how a very strategic and well planned marketing campaign will draw (I prefer “drive”) quality traffic to your product or service. Note that this campaign is not currently running with Google. They wanted between $11 and $25 per click for my keywords. I believe I averaged somewhere around $0.70 per click for the same result. | |