No SEM Value Meals Sold Here

05/21/2009

by John McCarthy Director, SEO - ADOTAS EXCLUSIVE
The other day I followed up with a company that I spoke to earlier about creating a paid search campaign. This company, located in southern California, is an original equipment manufacturer that primarily sells to other businesses within the state. While this company could sell their products outside of California, the delivery costs of the product make such sales opportunities cost prohibitive.

Upon taking my call, the general manager was extremely ecstatic. He informed me they had selected another agency and launched a search engine optimization campaign. Within 30 days, this firm already had achieved top 10 rankings for many of the company’s keywords, including several #1 rankings.

One might imagine I would be less than ecstatic at this point. Not so. Although I did not get the sale, I shared my congratulations and asked what keywords had noteworthy rankings. He quickly rattled off “city1” keyword, “city2” keyword, “city3” keyword and so forth. Apparently the entire SEO campaign of about 50 terms consisted of geo-targeted keywords. I immediately launched my web browser and validated the general manager’s findings. He was absolutely correct – every keyword he provided was on the first page of Google with many keywords ranking #1.

As I stared at Google’s search results, I realized the page looked really different. The first thing I noticed was there were little to no paid search listings. Then I looked up at the volume of search results: 9,950 pages. “There must be a mistake,” I thought while re-entering the search query. Again, Google returned 9,950 pages.

I then asked the general manager a jaw dropping question, “What is the monthly search volume for the ‘city1’ keyword?” All of the sudden the once ecstatic general manager fell silent.

I quickly fired up Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool and found the answer “Not Enough Data”.

It turns out this company had implemented a search engine optimization campaign targeting keywords with no search volume. Yikes! While Google’s keyword tool is not perfect by any means, it is usually within a reasonable ballpark. After analyzing the 100 geo-targeted keywords this company was targeting, only 4 keywords registered any search volume on Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool.

I then reiterated to the general manager why my recommendation to implement a paid search advertising campaign was best for his company. I stated that 15 of his general keywords had over 100,000 queries per month and others 20,000-50,000 queries per month.

I explained how we could target California businesses by employing IP targeting and acquire 12-15% of that search traffic. Furthermore we could implement contextual advertising as well as display advertising and place text ads and banner ads on local sites like the Los Angeles Times along with business blogs visited by the company’s customers. Under such a campaign we could implement all sorts of testing scenarios to maximize conversions such as A/B testing, multivariate, day parting strategies, and bid position by location strategies.

The current bids ranged from $1.15 to $3.25. We estimated the campaign would need a monthly budget of $4,750 a month to target California businesses. While this budget was twice what he agreed to pay the current agency, the manager agreed the proposed campaign would be at least 100 times more targeted than existing efforts.

The general manager thanked me for the call. He wasn’t sure he had a large enough media budget but he would start by looking in his SEO contract for a termination provision. As I hung up the phone, it occurred to me that sales professionals are not talking to clients about suitability. Granted this is not the sexy part of solution selling – but nonetheless the responsible part.

Sales professionals should ask clients about their immediate and long term revenue goals, making sure the solution fits the business needs. This applies to all traffic generation campaigns - SEO, paid search, affiliate marketing, display advertising, just as it does for website design. If we fail to act like responsible sales professionals we will simply become order takers and this does not appeal to me. Honestly, I for one really don’t ever want to say, “Would you like a side of social media with your SEO value meal today?”

For more insight visit Pay Per Click Management