Effective Website Design Increases Business

The foundation of marketing is understanding your audience and in order to do so you must put yourself in their shoes.  Online consumers are initially limited in their understanding of your business and have no way of telling if your product or service is a fit. Therefore a business owner must take a step back and look at their site from the consumer’s perspective and then compare that experience to their competitors. Websites are now considered the first step in making a decision to buy. If your website fails to effectively represent you and your product then why drive clients there?

Ok, so let’s say you launch a Redzilla advertising campaign.  Your ad launches and you notice your traffic has gone up but you didn’t receive a single phone call, lead, sale or conversion.  Your first thought will be, well the leads must be poor quality, right? Wrong. If you have an outdated or cluttered website that fails to entice your next potential client then not converting is inevitable. You see, the problem with today’s online marketing is not the reach or the clicks, it’s ensuring that clicks convert.

To give you an idea, here are two websites; now look at the sites below as a user looking to buy “x”:

Website A

Do you consider this site user-friendly? In other words, upon visiting the site do you know exactly what is being sold and how to purchase in a few seconds?

Now you return to your search results and find this site:

Website B

Granted, the two sites above sell different products, but which site would you be more likely to make a purchase through? The answer to the question is simple, Website B.

Upon visiting Website B, you see a very clean & orderly interface with an excellent design. You know exactly what they sell, and they make it easy to buy.

Website A is incredibly cluttered, has a poor design and there’s no clear indication of what is being sold and how to purchase.

Why Should You Care?

Conversion is an essential part of search engine marketing because it deals with what happens after the customer has clicked on your search engine listing.

If you’re not positive about the effectiveness of your site, ask one of our Redzilla professionals today, because no one will make a purchase if your site devalues your product.

Cut Your Costs and Be found On Search Engines With Redzilla.com

Google, Yahoo and Bing all offer great ways to capitalize on search traffic, most of us know this as Adwords or PPC advertising.

Google launched their AdWords program in  March of 2002 with a purpose of providing highly targeted advertising solutions to marketers and over a few years it has shown remarkable growth. Within that time Yahoo and Bing (at the time Live Search) adopted the ad model and the rest is history.

According to a study on Yellow Pages vs. Internet Advertising more than 60% of local search happens online & Google continues to dominate as the primary global search engine. An estimated 6.0 billion search queries were conducted at Google Search, representing 65.2 percent of all search query conducted during a given time period.

With that being said successful business owners must advertise on Google Search to increase their chances of being found online. Most business owners do not have the knowledge base to set up and manage their own Adwords & PPC campaigns & due to this lack of understanding Adwords & PPC management services are utilized.

Average Costs for Adwords & PPC  Management:

• One time set up cost, $975 and includes first month optimization and management.
• Set up packages range in price from $600-$1400.
• Estimated monthly management cost is $285 per month there after.
• Average monthly ad spent to pay for “cost per click” $250.
• Total investment for 3 months of PPC advertising equals $2295.00
• Yearly Cost – $7110 / Monthly Cost $595.

Prices will vary per city and per campaign.  Redzilla will take care the set up and execution of your Adwords campaign while reducing your average costs.

Be a Detective:Tracking Made Simple

Understanding what is needed to get results from an advertising campaign is a challenge that thousands of business owners now face.  Marketing professionals must track efforts online and offline to better understand how and where consumers are being reached.

These efforts go beyond just checking your website traffic.  For example if you’re running a campaign associated with a print coupon offline, the print coupon must have a call to action that will allow you to track the effectiveness of the campaign. An effective way to track the campaign is driving the consumer to a website where they must enter a promo code to receive a discount or free product.

If you are running a pay per click campaign online, tracking through a spreadsheet is an excellent way to get started especially if you have the time to dedicate to it. This is generally the most accurate way to track ROI and to determine which campaigns, ad groups and keywords generate the most revenue and have the highest ROI.

If you’re short on time, there are also services that track your conversion rate and your ROI for you automatically. Redzilla recommends Google Analytics to all it’s clients. You can easily track all internet traffic, where it originates from and which areas to focus your marketing budget.

However, be aware that the highest ROI does not necessarily mean a high profit/return. In PPC terms what this means is that you have to know the different ROIs of your keywords in their different positions and then select the optimum combination within your budget constraints. For example, making 10% profit on sales of $1,000 is better than 50% profit on sales of $10 while the ROI of the latter is higher.

Services like Redzilla.com will provide insight to better assist with your PPC campaigns and determine which keywords will yield a high ROI and high profit.

As Pay Per Click Costs Skyrocket Small Businesses Seek Alternatives

Determining how to effectively create and maintain a search marketing campaign that will yield a return is a challenge that most business owners now face. Research finds an accelerating trend toward online media for local search, however research also shows that small and local businesses still continue to struggle on effective ways to capitalize on local search traffic. Despite the growing use of online media for local searches, only 44% of small businesses have a website and half spend less than 10% of their marketing budget online. This lack of adoption in most cases is related to affordable search marketing management services shutting down. Small Businesses no longer have the resources needed to effectively market & maintain their business online at a feasible cost.

According to research from Nielsen,  63% of consumers and small business owners will visit the internet first for information about local companies and 82% use search engines to research. Of that 82%,  50% visit search engines prior to any other source online.

Given that more than half of the population visits a search engine first to find information on local business, the price of targeted keywords has skyrocketed due to supply and demand.  With said demand came hundreds of internet marketing management services. These services equipped business owners with the tools and understanding to properly monetize and optimize online marketing campaigns. This rush of a new understanding and new way to reach potential customers  resulted in a very competitive and saturated marketplace.  High bid prices soon became the new focus of business owners and management services. High bid prices lead to a shortage in clients, ultimately leading to a shortage in feasible search marketing options driving search marketing management services out of business.

For example a PPC Management Service MainStreet Host, is no longer accepting new clients.  If you visit MainStreetHost.com you will be greeted by the message below.

Hundreds of management services are shutting down leaving business owners with no alternative to high PPC costs. The same study showed that only 9% of small businesses are satisfied with their online marketing efforts.  With a lack of options small business owners will continue to struggle online without an alternative to search marketing management services.  Business owners are now faced with one of two options:

• Manage your own search marketing campaign and potentially pay high ppc costs that yield no return.
• Pay high retainers for remaining search marketing management services.

A primary issue with setting up a search campaign is first understanding how to effectively determine which keywords will generate leads. Keyword research will lead to:

• Higher click through rates
• Lower cost per click
• Higher rankings
• Higher conversion rates

Redzilla.com is now providing an affordable alternative to search marketing management services. Redzilla.com will do the heavy lifting for business owners by providing 100% ad management including the tedious task of monetizing your search marekting campaign. Redzilla professionals take the guesswork out of your Google advertising and execute a precise strategy that will bring the most customers to your door. This strategy removes the middle man and you no longer have to pay high retainers or high ppc costs, simply pay for potential customers that visit your site and Redzilla will do the rest.

Strengthen Your Reputation With PPC

Savvy business owners take their online reputation seriously. When negative reviews come in and bad press starts popping up online, pay per click ads can be used to immediately start repairing the damage.   Here are three ways to usePPC advertising to strengthen your business’ reputation online.

1. Several search engines allow ads on brand terms related to a business. Search yours often and monitor the results for your name. If you notice competitors bidding on terms for your business, get in the game and place pay per click ads for your own terms. Those are customers you don’t want to lose to your competition.

2. In a crisis, pay per click ads are a fast and easy way to reach people seeking information. Placing a PPC ad for terms related to a developing crisis is an effective way to direct traffic to an updated source of information.

3. PPC ads help detract from negative blogs and unflattering content that comes up in search results. While you prepare and implement a plan of action to move negative content down of the first page of Google or other search engines, a PPC ad can be used to combat the bad press.

Yelp Reviews to Appear in Google Adwords?

Last week, SearchEngineLand.com came across a unique Google adwords campaign and blogged about their findings. In the screenshot that surfaced, an ad for a San Diego Auto Repair company was followed by a link to their Yelp reviews and a graphic of the business’ star rating from their Yelp reviews.

This sparked a small fleurry of google searches from bloggers and adwords followers who were trying to recreate the results.  Interestingly, it appears that few additional ads could be found to be featuring Yelp reviews. It appears that Google was conducting a very small experiment of on ads that link to external review sites.

At this time, links to yelp reviews have not come out of beta, but it will be interesting to see if this feature is rolled out for Google adwords campaigns in the near future.

Adwords Art

Sixt, a German car company with a sense of humor and some out-of-the-box thinkers, experimented withtheir online marketing strategies in 2008 and came up with some clever ASCII art to stand out from the crowd with their google adwords campaign.

The ads stood out, made a splash in the online marketing world and resulted in a 47% increase in their clickthrough rate.

Google now filters and removes this type of ad, but Sixt’s adword campaigns above are a great use of creativity to boost results.