WebHitsConsulting

Owning the highest volume phrases in your industry is almost certainly valuable and each industry has these core key phrases that more people search first when they sit down at Google. Here are some examples of a core phrase for three different industries: “dedicated server”, “IT services” or “New York Dog Walking”. Here are examples of a long tail phrase for the same industry:”Fedora Server leased unlimited bandwidth”, “getting blackberry to work with Outlook San Francisco” or “dog walking service upper east side Manhattan”. Although these sorts of phrases get far less traffic, they often convert to customers better. Furthermore, all the long tail phrases, when added together, can equal or exceed the conversions that you’d get from owning the core phrase. In the graph below, the area under the long tail of this graph has as much volume as the area at the head

One of the reasons core phrases have more volume is simply the nature of how people search. We tend to type one search, and if we don’t find the results we expect right at the time, then we type in another phrase instead of drilling down in the search result pages. For instance, imagine you were traveling to New York and type “hotel new york” and see hotel super sites, hotels in Albany and a hotel in Midtown Manhattan in the search results. You might realize that you need to be more specific. So you type “hotel upper east side new york city” and, even still, the results aren’t what you expect because you’re finding rooms for $450 a night! So you finally type “hotel upper east side new york city inexpensive” and find the Marriott Courtyard near the FDR at 92nd Street and you book your room. So in this case, the core phrase and the long tail phrases were searched, but ultimately, the long tail phrase got the conversion.

You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.
YOGI BERRA

We take Yogi to heart, so before setting up an Adwords account, we like to ask some questions to get a clearer understanding of your expectations.

What You Do

1. What does your company (or team) do? If you have various products or services, please list them all.
2. Who is your primary target market or audience for your products and services — list them all.
3. What are you trying to sell or promote? What do you want people to do (buy, visit, download, subscribe)? Be specific about each product’s call to action.

Defining goals for this campaign

1. How much do you want to invest in advertising on Adwords per month? Be specific.
2. What kind of results are you looking for: Generating leads, Increasing traffic, Conversions to sales, lowering your costs-per-conversion/lead, branding? Please be specific and attach hard numbers to each goal.
3. What would you consider a good return on investment? If the ROI differs between services or products, list each one.

About Your Customers

1. Describe your typical customer. Be specific. If it’s a business, then who would find you at the business and who would approve.
2. Where do your current customers live or work?
3. How much is a typical customer worth in net and gross revenue for the one sale?
4. How much is a typical customer worth over the lifetime of that customer?

More About Your Service

1. What are the unique features of your product or service? Are they credible?
2. What are the key benefits that your product or service offers?
3. What features and benefits are most releant to your customers?
4. What action to you want people to take after they click on your ad and when they get to your site?
5. What information will people need before they would take this call to action?

Here is an article about dealing with negative publicity for businesses.

The strategy of pushing negative publicity off the front page of Google involves placing positive web pages above the offending posts on the Google result pages for the predefined phrases. Presumably, your site will already appear above the negative publicity when people are searching your brand — if not…you need more SEO services.

If you’re having a problem with negative publicity, we have designed a package to help you. Please visit our list of SEO Services that will help you.