Search engine marketing should be aimed at return-on-investment (ROI) and goals should be achieved with as little effort as possible. Because more and more industries are seeing the potential of search engines, it will become harder to rank for everything you want. This means getting relevant traffic will require a bigger investment and that in turn can ruin your ROI.
Choosing a less competitive market and search terms with high traffic volumes can get you much cheaper traffic. But does that convert into sales? Here are a few examples how to get cheaper traffic for a better ROI.
- Branding and creating awareness with search
- Exposure is cheaper than clicks
- Ensuring ROI with cheaper traffic
- Profitting from high traffic search terms
Branding and creating awareness with search
Search engine marketing is normally “pull marketing”: Someone requests something and you offer it. But it can also be used as “push marketing”: Someone didn’t know he was looking for something until he came across your offer. Push marketing will probably convert less well into sales (or any other goal on your website), but for exposure/awareness purposes it can work even better than staying within your defined niche.
When there isn’t much awareness for the solutions you offer or when your audience doesn’t even know the problem it solves is relevant to them, you might need to try other (online) marketing solutions than search engines. Normally you could rent a bannerspace on somewhat relevant resources that target the same audience, but you can also get cheap exposure from search engines.
Exposure is cheaper than clicks
For instance in Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing or MSN Adcenter; When you bid on a less relevant search term and you use a very specific proposition of the thing you offer, you won’t get the highest clickthrough-rate. But the traffic you recieve is relevant as long as you are honest in the adtext. You might pay more per click than other advertisers because of that lower CTR, but you don’t pay for the exposure, just for the clicks.
Example:
You offer logistic software for the transport business, then people might not search for your product often and they might even be unaware that they would need such a service. In that case try bidding on terms like “buying a truck” and then use an ad like “Buying a new truck? You might want to track what your drivers are doing. www.TruckTracker.com”. If that isn’t what someone was looking for, they might just haved spotted it and it made them think. So make sure you brand your message. Of course this is just one example, but it shows that search can be used as push marketing.
Ensuring ROI with cheaper traffic
Both paid and unpaid search listings suffer an ever increasing competition. This competition competes for just 21 spots (in Google 10 unpaid, 3 top ads and 8 paid results on the right) on the first page and the second page is rarely visited. Nowadays even the most specific long tails are targeted by all bigger players. The websites with the most revenue on that search term can outrank anyone in both the paid and unpaid (yes that too depends on effort and money) results and there is no place left for a highly relevant, smaller retailer. So how does the smaller retailer get his traffic? Or how do you maintain a high ROI without having to outbid everyone?
The trick in ROI is that effort equals money and wit can reduce the required effort. You have to be a good online salesman and you need to focus highly on usability, but turning less relevant volumes of traffic into conversions can reduce the cost per conversion enormously. This is best explained with an example. Let’s state the following:
You sell mortgages and loans nationwide and as you might guess; The competition is enormous and even though the revenues are high, traffic is expensive and thus your ROI is minimal. Long tails are targeted by all your competitors as well, so no cheap traffic there.
But what are the loans or mortgages used for? If you are used to the competition in the loan business, the competition in other businesses is peanuts and traffic is much cheaper. With loans, try focussing on terms related to buying a boat, refurbishing your house, buying a car, expensive holidays, new kitchens, buying a computer and many more, but make the traffic relevant.
Search term:
“buying boat”
Ad text:
“Buying a boat? Finance ready?”
Compare every loan provider
for tailored boat loans
www.loanCompare.com
Landing page:
And create a landing page tailored for boat financing with possibilities to get more information, but a clear button to request an estimate for their situation.
Where it says ad text, you can also say description in organic results, because even organic results can be steered in great detail. You can use this example for every slightly related topic. And making it relevant is easier than you might think. Cheap traffic is, irrelevant traffic turned into conversions.
Profitting from high traffic search terms
As you might have read in the previous topics: In paid search you don’t pay for exposure, just for clicks; Irrelevant traffic might be less competitive; And any traffic can lead to conversions when you make it relevant. These points are as true for normal searches as for very popular searches.
Take for instance news topics, popular people, government information or seemingly unexploitable topics. News (like war Afghanistan) gets high volumes of searches, but not many advertisers compete on related terms. Most popular people (like Clint Eastwood) get only a few ads for their name. Government information and social dilemmas (like unemployment) get little attention, although they are easily exploitable for commercial purposes.
- See your ad as free exposure and less as a cost per click based revenue maker.
- Brand the message and sometimes even prevent clicks.
- And make pages specifically for converting irrelevant traffic into sales.
Conclusion
Any traffic can be good traffic as long as you are clear about what your services are from the beginning. Prevent people from visiting your website or even contacting you with the wrong intentions. The costs of clicks, bandwith and your time can become your downfall if you don’t. These rules are as true for paid ads as for organic listings so read them as such.
I wish you much success in your business and try to give me feedback once you’ve tried it.
I’ve been thinking along the same lines as you mention regarding exploiting high volume search terms that might not be directly linked to your product.
I find your observations very interesting, yet I haven’t found the exact method or strategy of how to do this. Would you consider doing an article just about this topic: how to make unrelated traffic convert? I think I need some examples before I can picture how it can be done in a way that is worthwhile the effort.
Fun tips, I’ve tried most of them with very different success rates. Google really tries to kill irrelevant ads in AdWords by artificially upping CPC’s, so some of these tactics are hard to use in practice (or you need to do a lot of manual labor, ie crating good ads and landingpages).
The title of your post is pretty bad though! Can’t really connect it to the contents. How about “4 high-ROI tips for alternative search engine marketing” or something?
“Make irrelevant traffic convert” will probably be a future post then! With examples how I did that in the past and how I see new possibilities in the future (with the increasing importance of quality scores).
Let me give you one example to start with:
I once was the only one bidding on the word “Nederland” (The Netherlands in Dutch) with an exact match in Adwords and I offered insurances. Not very related and with a standard minimum bid price of almost 1 dollar, not very cheap traffic. Very high volumes of people searching for it though, and with many different reasons for searching it.
Minimum bid price is mainly based on relevancy factors, but not that many compared to organic search. So I made a very relevant page for the term “Nederland” and used a page that could even score for it (third page) algorithmicly. The minimum bid price dropped to about 0.25 dollar and that was cheap enough te get some conversion.
What I didn’t know was that people mainly typed just “Nederland” to get info about their own country, but mainly to get patriotic ego boosts. At least when I used an ad text and landing page texts to emphasize that, I got great conversions. Translated it would say something like “Dutch insurances offer the best protection. See how Dutch insurances compare to each other.” And the landing page offered some (real) research about bad insurances abroad (saying nothing about Dutch ones being good) and a comparison of Dutch insurances with my client on top.
It sounds a little far fetched to do things this way, but it worked. In stead of a 30 dollar per conversion with related keywords. The word “Nederland” had a 10 dollar per conversion rate!