Win at the pay-per-click game

When it comes to niche marketing, many companies using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to reach new customers make the same mistake: they drive prospects to their home page.

This costs companies thousands of dollars each year in lost sales and increased PPC fees, says Heather Lutze, author of The Findability Formula: The Simple and Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing. Before launching a PPC campaign, she notes, you must be clear about your customers’ intent at each stage of the buying cycle, and their search habits. That means you must think like your prospects and customize the results you give them based on their search terms. Simply having every searcher land on your home page is a formula for disaster. Here are some details to consider for each phase.

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  The Information Phase. During this stage, customers don’t know what they want yet. They are only aware of a pain, a problem, a need, or a desire that they’re trying to solve or meet. Use your most “generic,” one- or two-word key terms to drive prospects to your home page during this phase.
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  The Shopping Phase. Once customers have begun shopping — comparing features, sizes, colors, brand names, price points, and retailers — they add more modifiers to their search term to get more detailed results. At this point, rather than drop someone off at your home page for general information, you want to deliver prospects directly to a landing page with the specific information they’re looking for, based on their search keywords.
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  The Purchasing Phase. Consumers who are ready to make a buying decision use the longest and most specific search terms. At this point, make sure you bring people directly to your shopping cart page. Note that your longer, more specific, highly-targeted keyword phrases will have a lower search volume than more general terms. That should not cause you undue concern, however, because their conversion rate will be higher since those customers know exactly what they’re looking for.