In this video, our pay per click team about PPC strategy 101, tactics for small businesses. Dave, Eric and Chad discuss a couple of PPC strategies that you can actually apply to your own campaigns. The first thing they have to say is, PPC starts with your website! Press play to hear more about PPC strategy for small business.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hi. Welcome to PPC Strategy 101, Small Business Tactics. We're just going to be talking about a couple of PPC strategies that you can actually apply to your own campaigns. So starting off, I want to talk to you even before you even get into the PPC.
You first need really need to take a cold, hard look at your website. First off, you really need to understand, is this site built to convert? Because first of all, that's the biggest point in PPC, is to actually bring people to your site, get them to fill out a form, or actually do a phone call.
Couple of ways you can do this is to make sure you have a strong call to action on there. And honestly, just the formatting of the site. You need to make sure that it's user-friendly, looks really nice, and really, want I like to tell people to do is get a really honest opinion of your site.
Go out there and find some people that actually criticize you. Bring the good things that they like about it, the bad things. Really understand that you're not tailoring this site for your own taste, but actually, to drive your business. So that's definitely something you want to keep in mind. Also, make sure that you understand what your competitors are doing, and just overall what their sites look like. Get an understanding on how your business site should be set up.
I think that just understanding where you need to add your call to actions, understanding your competitors, really get offers out there, and just being able to counter that yourself on your site is really going to put you in a position, when you actually decide to jump into PPC, to be successful. Absolutely, Dave. And me and Eric over here are going to talk about some basic PPC strategy. The first would be to understand your return on investment, or ROI. Keywords can be intimidating to somebody when they're first setting up a PPC campaign.
For example, if you're working as a lawyer, some of the keywords, depending on where they are in the country, could be anywhere from $10 up to $30, $40, $50. And some people would be intimidated, like I said initially, spending that much money on bidding. But you have to know what your return on investment is.
If you have a customer that does personal injury for example, in Los Angeles, they might be paying $80-90 a click. But if their average case is $100,000, $200,000, in retrospect, it's really not much money. So really understand what your budget is, what the return on that is, so you can truly make an educated decision as to what you should be betting on keywords for.
Number two, I'm going to hand it over to Eric.
Yeah. I mean, like you said, kind of timing with ROI. Especially for small businesses, they need a solid PPC strategy for the long haul. You don't want to waste money on areas that you don't specialize in. So really what you have to understand is, what sort of clients are you going after? If you're a lawyer, know the specialty that brings in the most money. If you're a home restoration service, you got to know if you're specializing in foundation repair, bathroom remodeling, kitchen, et cetera, et cetera. Don't waste money in areas that your client doesn't actually service.
Absolutely. And that leads me to number three for the basic PPC strategy. And the third one is, really don't spread yourself too thin. That's a big issue I see a lot of people make is, first of all, you have to know what your budget is. And second of all, if your budget is not up to par with what it should be, the target, every aspect of your business, you really have to figure out, what aspects can you target cost-effectively in making money back.
So we'll use an attorney, for example. If you know it's chapter 13, chapter 11, chapter seven, debt negotiation foreclosure, but he has $2,000 budget in New York City, we really can't target all of those. In a sense, you could, but you're not going to get your money back. Find one or two things that you can be competitive with that budget, and do it very well.
You don't have to do everything. Find something you can make money at. Use your budget wisely, bet on proper keywords. And like Eric said, know what you're doing. It sounds very simple, but really know what you're targeting. If you want to target only new chapter seven cases, target just that. You don't have to worry about everything else until the budget's there. Next, we're going to go back to the other thing, is tracking, which I'll give back to Eric for that.
Right. I mean, most clients, you're going to have the AdWords conversion code, web to lead form on their page. But the number one thing that you need to remember is at the end of the day, the client's going to come back to you and say, what have you done for me? What sort of leads have you given me?
The best way to do that is, cover it on all fronts. Take advantage of that [? web to lead ?] form and use the AdWords conversion tracking code. But also track the phone calls that they get. If you're not tracking phone calls, you're missing out on a huge chunk of [INAUDIBLE] conversions, and possibly, you're not getting a good idea of what's actually converting. Like Eric said, track everything. The great thing about PPC is you can track everything. Don't leave anything open, so when you go back to your customer, you can show them phone calls, emails, contact form, inquiries, everything. Track, track, track, track.
I agree. And I think that kind of goes across just small business marketing plans on the whole. You really want to know what specific areas, whether it be television, radio, [INAUDIBLE], Yellow Pages, even online marketing. You want to take the credit for what you're actually bringing to the site. So you know whether or not PPC's working for you, or if you should really take your money and invest it somewhere else, like radio, if you're seeing a better ROI there.
So I think all those things are really help. Small, medium businesses understand where they need to put their marketing budget, and really kind of squeeze the most out of their marketing dollars. So that wraps up our session for today. So tune in next week. We'll have another video as well.