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How much is your overall advertising budget, do you have one, do you measure the response from previous campaigns?
How many flyers would you knock out at the start of the season, do you do it yourself or do you pay a company to do it for you?
I recently did a drop with 8,000 (distribution company put them out) and 1000 or so into the local shops, golf clubs, hair dressers, ect the response has been very good so far.
I haven't done ad words myself but I hear it's expensive, do you have a budget in mind for what you intend to spend?
Hi Mitchel.
To be perfectly honest, you should be TOP in a local keyword search as you should be thinking of keywords that make you TOP.
A major mistake businesses make is to COMPETE with keywords that are popular, then add those keywords to their marketing material.
What you should be doing is think of the keywords relevant to you ie. name of website, different services you are offering etc.
My other business has nothing to do with gardening, but if you search "Shady Olive" (which is what I use as a marketing ploy), your search will reveal my other website in the top 5 at least, and the top 7 of 10 on first page of Google.
If you use keywords such as "gardener" " landscaper" "lawn care" for example, unless you have had a website for the last 30 years and have worked on keyword searches for the same amount of time, you will have no chance of getting those keywords searches top ranked.
Another way of getting those keyword searches ranked higher for your benefit is to open eBay, Facebook, Twitter accounts relating to your business, with the same keywords associated.
Hope some of this will help.
David.
David, of course you can rank for search terms that no-one else wants to rank for. Ranking for terms like 'Shady Olive' has no commercial value to anyone else, so a site could be SEO'd and ranking for that term in a couple of days.
Also, any SEO worthy of the title can rank a site for commercially valuable keywords in the gardening and landscaping sectors. In the grand scheme of things, these terms are fairly low competition.
Adwords (as with any other form of advertising) is only expensive if you are doing it wrong. Adwords, used based on a decent marketing strategy, is a very powerful tool.
Hi Stuart.
Yeah I see where you are coming from, and maybe I am hitting this from a different angle.
The point I was trying to make is that it would take a very, very long time to rank highly with keywords such as "gardener" "Landscape Maintenance" even with blogs, Facebook accounts 100's of clickback partners etc.
As an advertising/marketing strategy being ranked 1 with Shady Olive is invaluable to me as rather than try and compete with the most popular keywords in this sector, I just place "search Shady Olive for more info" (Paraphrased).
Now if we are just talking about Joe Pubs wanting a gardener and searching using the word "gardener" I completely agree, but that's when local keywords become more important as I am sure you know.
At the end of the day, all those with websites are at the real mercy of the persons' choice in the wording they use to apply their search.
Cheers.
Hi Mitchel,
If you have time we recommend starting a blog giving advice and guidance to potential customers. On top of the benefit of making yourself look trustworthy and knowledgeable it has proven SEO benefits. 300-600 word articles with several mentions of the keywords you are looking to improve position with will increase chances of Google picking them up. Even just 2 blogs a month on your website would help. The reason for this? If you start off the year with a website that has 10 pages featuring your keywords, that is 10 chances for Google to see and rank that specific page. Now if you add 2 blogs a month then by the end of the year you will have 24 new pages on top of the 10 original pages filled with keywords you wish to be found with. The result is now 34 chances for Google to find and rank your page.
There are lots of other little SEO tricks you can do on the site, then just use adwords to boost your visibility on those harder to reach keywords.
Hope this helps!
-Stewart
You need to discover what a Google advert would cost for a typical search sentence & what your current conversion rate is; probably 1%, so if ad cost £1 then £100 to get order/ work.What is the average value of work placed?
Have a read of this. It may not be a direct use but they post some very good information. Link
worth a read on how to write a blog
Unfortunately it could still cost you a lot of money with very little return!