Contractor Marketing Blog

Double your Lead Conversion With These 3 Paid Search Strategies

When managed correctly and to best practices, paid search is one of the only advertising vehicles that delivers one of the best returns on your monthly marketing investment.  Whether you are starting out for the first time or already have active paid search campaigns I’m going to walk you through a number of proven strategies that can help you stretch your budget, lower your cost per lead and double your lead conversion rate.  Here it goes:

1. Start with a small territory and build your campaign out one product or service at a time.  Starting out small will give you a sense for the competitive landscape, average bids and will give you a feel for traffic volume.
2. Start with Google.  Google is the main search player when it comes to paid search.  They own close to 70% market share.  Master Google first and explore other options like Bing and Yahoo after you have established a scalable paid search model.
3. Understand the Google Quality Score.   Every time a searcher types in keywords that match your campaign your ad will appear.  This is called an impression.  If the searcher clicks on one of the paid search listings (yours or a competitor) than an online transaction or auction takes place and you or your competitor will be charged a click by Google.  (By the way there are over 400 Million Google searches everyday)  The cost you pay for the click and your ad position is determined by your Google quality score.  The quality score measures relevance which is factored by a number of different components.  The higher the quality score, the lower you will pay per click and you will receive better competitive positioning.  It is quite possible to bid less on a keyword and receive a better position than your competitor if you follow these best practices:

• Place your keywords into an adgroup that is very specific to the campaign.  For example if you manage a plumbing company you should have over 30 different adgroups.  One for water heaters, one for tankless water heaters, one for toilet repair, so on and so forth.  Place like keywords and assign them to an adgroup. Grouping your keywords in this manner gives you the ability to make your adcopy extremely relevant and actionable.
• Work your keywords into your ad copy.
• Create urgency in your ad copy.  Here are some urgency phrases that work:

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•  Create landing pages for each adgroup.  Most paid search management companies for small business do not do this and this is a huge part to the success of your campaign.  Dropping a prospective user to your home page hurts lead conversion.  Setup a landing page so you can measure response.
• Use a separate phone number and call tracking software to monitor phone calls.   

If you require paid search campaign coaching or need professional paid search management we can help.  Call us at 866.532.6224 to setup a time for us to connect and discuss your paid search needs.

About The Author:  Steve Teneriello is the Founder of The Service Coach and is a seasoned senior marketing strategist and business development professional experienced in both residential and commercial sales and digital marketing.  Throughout his career Steve has worked with over 300 small to medium-sized service business owners helping them develop and implement systematic and formula driven marketing, sales and operations strategies that fuel growth and profitability.  Learn More About Steve Here