Online Search: Small Businesses Level The Playing Field
by Harry Hoover
Published on this site: April 28th, 2005 - See
more articles from this month...
Seventy percent of US households use the web when shopping
locally, and about 25 percent of all searches are looking
for local information. As more and more households make the
switch to broadband connections, this trend will continue
to escalate.
Search engines have eclipsed print and TV ads as the primary
way consumers find local products and services. But until
now large national and international brands had a stranglehold
on Internet search marketing. Only they had the manpower or
outside resources to plan and implement a multiple site, online
search marketing program.
Why should your business get into the online search pay-per-click
(PPC) arena? Let's do the math. A recent US Bancorp Piper
Jaffray study indicates that the average lead from a search
engine costs $0.29. Yellow pages and direct mail leads cost
$1.18 and $9.94 respectively. So, a search engine delivers
four leads for the price of one Yellow Page lead and 34 for
the cost of a single direct mail lead.
But that is not all. PPC advertising:
- expands your market
- targets more, higher income consumers
- is measurable
Some businesses will look for ways NOT to take advantage of this
opportunity. I don't have a website, they whine. How will I figure
out which sites I should advertise on? How will I manage all those
keywords across multiple sites?
Google and Yahoo! answer some of those questions. If you
do online PPC with either, they will distribute your ads across
multiple sites. However, you'll still have to manage much
of the program yourself.
New services are now available that allow small local and
regional companies to effectively and efficiently hook customers
online and only in the geographic areas where the businesses
operate.
ReachLocal is my favorite of the new services. It is the
one I'm using for my own business and for that of my clients.
It selects the sites on which your ads appear, manages keywords
across publishers, optimizes your keywords on a daily basis
and even provides a free website for those businesses without
a web presence. Additionally, it makes all of your leads measurable.
You get daily reports on web
visits, emails and telephone calls generated by your program.
PPC is perfect for high cost local transactions such as home
purchases, mortgages, or medical services. So, no more excuses.
You now have the ability to level the playing field with national
competitors. Get local.
Harry Hoover is managing principal of Hoover ink PR, http://www.hoover-ink.com
He has 26 years of experience in crafting and delivering bottom
line messages that ensure success for serious businesses like Brent
Dees Financial Planning, Levolor, New World Mortgage, North Carolina
Tourism, Ty Boyd Executive Learning Systems, VELUX and Verbatim.
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