Boise and GEO Targeting

Let’s say you want to sell a Toyota in Boise, Ohio.

Most people would set up an IP targeting campaign and use keywords like “toyota” and “camery”. This, is the best & most logical place to start. What about that other half of (bastard) searchers who type “boise toyota”. Chances are their SERP’s will be scartered with Idaho related PPC ads.

How do you fix that…

IP Campaign Keywords: “toyota” & “boise ohio toyota”

GEO Campaign Keywords: “boise idaho toyota”

Please, always include the state. Depending on the size of the campaign you could blow your entire ad budget if your small market shares the same name as any much larger market.

That is all.

SEM Campaigns Can Be Your Greatest Sales Force

Business’ goal is to increase revenue.  Different combinations of media are used to increase brand and product awareness, ultimatly creating a want or delivering on a need to a customer.  Advertising campaigns, like a sales force, go out and get customers.

SEM campaigns do entirely the same thing with few, if any differences at the highest level.  Consumer Bob looks for something (online) & discovers a product that fills a need.  The website speaks in a voice that relates to Consumer Bob… he practically becomes best friends with it, and then BAM!  Mastercard numbers get punched in, 2 day shipping is selected, and Consumer Bob waits patiently for his new toy to arrive.  A pleasant bedtime story.

 How is that different than having a sales person swing by his home?  Aside from the obvious, “Gee, Waldo.. If a sales person were there, Consumer Bob would HAVE to wear clothes.”

True, Bob is comfortable being alone in his apartment, but let’s talk about dollars spent and earned… by the business.

Say Consumer Bob purchased an mp3 player for $300.  He was the only person out of 30 visiting the site at that time to actually make a purchase.  The site converted 3.33% of the customers on the site and generated $10 in revenue per visitor or $300 per sale.  Now it cost this site.. we’ll call it “pear” to get visitors.  Natural or Paid Search aside, this particular site paid $1 to get Bob there and all of the other visitors were right around the same cost (per click). 

$10 spent to make $300.  All legit math aside, that is one rocking quotient that I would enjoy delivering to clients when talking about ROI for a campaign.

Now we fast forward to a consulting company; say manufacturing.  A new metric comes into play with large B2B sales.  LTV or Lifetime Value of a customer.  A consulting gig to completion, or better yet, a renewing contract may yield $100,000 per year.

 We don’t have to kid around and say the same amount of visitors would net the same amount of sales.  I would stop writing this minute and go back to school for a degree in engineering…  We can use some bigger numbers on the search side:  $1CPC (still) and 2K visitors per sale (0.05% conversion).  $2000 in media spend would net you $100K in revenue.

How much do you pay your sales person/sales team and how much does it cost you in overhead to support them?  Obviously your website isn’t going to convert a massive man-hour contract ont he spot.  It can deliver high quality leads to pass off to your project managers and the people on the team that see their paychecks get padded the most from year-over-year growth.

In summary, SEM drives qualified leads for a totally measurable cost.  When you hire someone to go find these opportunities for you…  can you measure their performance down to the phone call?  the e-mail?  or the site visit?

- W

A la Carte SEO Services

I’ve been working on developing some pay-per-click and search engine optimization services to sell as an A la Carte service. The list is fairly short right now to keep the products at an extremely high level of quality. Here is the list:

• Link Building/Directory Submission - $150 - 20 links
• PPC, Targeting Review/Revision - $150
• PPC, Google -> Yahoo Migration - $200
• PPC, Brand Analysis by DMA/MSA - $300/target

I am not looking to take on 300 clients, so you have a guarantee for some personal attention. E-mail me if you have any questions, Id be happy to answer some for you or even custom tailor a new product if the project seems interesting enough.

-W, waldo@sem-fu.com

multiple domain names

Beyond the basic stuff (get links & build quality content), big companies need big ideas.

What if when your company did something big — new territory, major product overhaul — you register a new, unique domain name for it.  Turbo charge the site with SEO/SEM first, press release it, yadda yadda, and then manage it seperatley throughout the product life cycle.  CFO’s like it b/c they can track/associate costs better… Marketing guys always love a new kick-ass project to work on.

If your main website has been optimized correctly, the new one should be a piece of cake.