In all my work with car dealers, it’s been rare that I’ve ever been able to give blanket, one-size-fits-all advice on any particular subject. There are so many different types of dealerships and so many different markets that what works in one may not work in another because of a variety of different factors.
Naturally, this is true for the rest of the universe of products and services. Cars and couches may have very little in common, but do you know what is common about them? If someone is considering buying them, they are probably going to search for them online, either to shop or to find a retail outlet to visit to do their shopping. Likewise business cards, bed linens, video game consoles, and almost everything else. We don’t even think about all the items we research on the Internet before we buy them anymore, but there’s a reason that “google” has become a verb.
We’re always searching, and our window to the world is the search engines of the world wide web. Search engines are that yellow brick road that leads to your door, if you let them.
I’ve talked about Search Engine Optimization and the basics of how to make your site more appetizing to search engines. The other half of the puzzle – the way to get more clicks to your site even if it isn’t completely optimized – is Search Engine Marketing.
And so we have the two things I can tell any car dealer (or almost any businessperson) without equivocation, that they should be spending money on. In this day and age, you absolutely must have an optimized and fully realized web site, and you absolutely must have a paid search campaign. Because your web site is your front door, and the search engine is the street you’re located on.
Now, three quick reasons you should be spending on a paid search campaign:
- Your site, even at its best, will not be served up for every relevant search term. To get in front of as many of the right people as possible, you must pay to cover the “gaps” in your optimization strategy.
- Search engine optimization feeds search engine marketing and vice versa. The amount you pay for paid search clicks is dependent in part on how relevant the search engine determines your site is to the keywords entered. Optimizing your site will increase your relevance, and if you “win” the click, your site’s relevance will increase, which will potentially decrease your cost on future clicks. For more information on relevance, click here.
- There are
often third-party lead “aggregators” out there that collect lead information. They then sell those leads back to the companies that sell the products that people were searching for. A pay-per-click or other paid search campaign will typically supersede most third-party aggregators, if your web site is properly optimized. Click on the screenshot at the right to get an example of just such a page. In a future post we’ll talk more about why you’re better off developing leads through your own site than signing up for an aggregator service, and how to prove it for yourself.
So now we’ve answered most of the why’s of search engine marketing – it helps optimize your page, grabs searchers you might not otherwise reach based on your page’s relevance, and it gets you in front of competition that is using aggregator services. So let’s talk a little about how much.
How much to spend on search engine marketing is a very difficult question. On the one hand, search engine marketing is extremely powerful – it lets you reach people everywhere and anywhere based on what they’re searching for. You can make your search ads appear globally or in the tiniest sliver of a single ZIP code. You’ll appear in blogs, related websites and every other conceivable place through Google’s AdSense network and other similar systems. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and think you can reach the entire world. But if your site and your business are not equipped to service the entire world, it hardly seems worthwhile to try and do so.
Moreover, your site needs to be prepared to receive new visitors and offer up the things that they are looking for. So you need appropriate landing pages within your site that address those items. For instance, if you are a video game retailer, you might have a Wii page, a PlayStation 3 page, and an XBox 360 page that offer games, accessories, et. al., so that in your paid search campaign you might have three different sets of keywords to reach those people. Because it hardly seems sensible to send someone who searched for “wii controllers” to your home page, where they have to wade through menus to get to the thing they were just searching for, right?
It’s obvious that there’s a lot to consider, and it’s easy to overspend and waste your money if you don’t have an educated eye to help you figure it all out. I don’t offer pay-per-click management services, because it’s a huge time commitment on its own, and it’s just a part of the bigger picture. But what I do offer is to help companies find the right partner for paid search marketing – one that knows their industry and concerns, as well as best practices. I teach the questions you need to ask, the results you need to be asking for, how to interpret them, and how to get the best out of your provider by providing feedback that helps guide them and increase your success.
That’s what it’s all about, right?
