| Adwords Really CAN Work For You |
| Search engines play a vital role in your business marketing strategy. 88% of customers use search engines to find a businesses, and 60% of that traffic is from Google. |
| If your website is high on the list of search engine results, your restaurant has an immediate advantage over the competition. Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of your website in search engine results. |
| Company Interface specializes in optimizing websites so they can appear higher in Google. We research and strategically use the right combination of keywords that are relevant to your business. |
| Because customers don't always know exactly what words to search for (or how to spell them), we also take into account combination of related keywords and spellings, to ensure that your website captures as many potential customers as possible. |
| It's undeniable that online users subsist off of search engines, such as Google, Yahoo or Bing, to accomplish their daily tasks. |
| Keep It Local |
| Both Google Adwords and Microsoft AdCenter provide a way to only display your ads in very specific geographical locations. This is an absolute must for every business website. If you do not have your campaigns set up to only reach people who live close enough to actually visit your business, then you are wasting clicks and money on people who don't even have a chance to convert. |
| Another thing you can do to target yourself locally is actually quite simple. Simply get a spreadsheet of all your keywords, and then append your city name to each keyword for another column. Do this again with city and state. And do it again with common misspellings or nicknames. For example, let's say you are Bluegrass Burgers here in Louisville, Kentucky (FYI, this place is amazing, I recommend the Bison burger with smoked Gouda cheese). You do a keyword search using the handy Adwords keyword tool and decide it would be worth it to begin advertising for the keyword burger joints. Here are just a few ideas for what you can do to expand your keyword options to snag the locals: |
- burger joints louisville
- burger joints louisville ky
- burger joints louisville kentucky
- burger joints in the ville
- burger joints in the ville ky
- burger joints in the ville kentucky
- burger joints lousiville (anyone else struggle
spelling louisville like this?!)
- burger joints lousiville ky
- burger joints lousiville kentucky
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| Let's concentrate on search engines.
To me, Google AdWords started off as not the right forum for
restaurants (in contrast to big companies) to spend their marketing
dollars. Of course, Google AdWords only charges you by click, so with
the right promotions restaurant might get some increased traffic.
Google, of course, sets the minimum bid based on the desirability of the
keyword from past customer behavior, so restaurants in more competitive
markets may incur higher costs but typically the keywords that
restaurants want are between $1 and $5. Certainly, it is hard to track
results, but restaurants that are starting out or the online market fits
their demographic should not write Google off. |
| What makes AdWords effective is that
Google allows restaurants to control what location the search is in and
what time the ad appears. Certainly, the inclusion of a Yelp rating has
let restaurants partially overcome the issue of credibility as a chunk
of searchers are still conscious of it being an ad. I'd like to
emphasize however that Google AdWords (the online classifieds) is not as
productive as search engine optimization (organic search results) and
local search (Google Places page) as both of those are the online
equivalent of public relations at this point. For restaurants that are
starting out (with low traffic to their website) and ones that have
fantastic Yelp ratings, Google Adwords is definitely an option to
investigate. Here restaurants put themselves in front of customers
desires, but restaurants must monitor the results as best they can. I
will talk about promotions through geo-location promotions in the social
media section. |
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