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Let Your Competition Do The Hard Work
If you are a big online retailer, you spend a good deal of time and money doing Internet research, especially with respect to keyword search terms, pay per click advertising strategies and so on.
You may even have a dedicated staff person whose job is to constantly perform these types of analysis and keep your strategies fresh and up to date with changes in search engine algorithms. But, what if you are not a big online retailer? What if it is you and your partner and your teenage daughter and maybe your wife and you are the only one who is working at it fulltime?
You still have to compete in the same space as the big guys but you do not have the horsepower to do all of that sophisticated analysis. Fortunately for you, the Internet is a very open and available medium. You can gain a lot of information that you can use to your advantage just by observing what your larger competitors are doing.
Pay per click ad research
The research shows that almost half of all viewers click on pay per click ads and many go on to purchase products (although the pay per click very frequently inspires a second search so natural search rankings can be just as important.) About seventy percent of all online retailers are using pay per click ads to gain additional traction on search engine results pages. The message? These ads are important to selling products. That means that they will be a major focus of attention for anyone who has the ability to do the analysis.
The big guys can afford to do lots of testing, running ads with different wording to see which attracts more traffic, how the different approaches convert and so on. As they gain experience and knowledge, the ads will change to reflect that knowledge. Those ads that remain the same over time are likely to be the ones that just keep generating business.
With that premise in mind, you can get some free advice from your competitors by watching the action in pay per click ads. Here is what you should try.
Conduct searches on the keywords that you would like to do well on. Take careful note of both the natural search rankings to see who has good strategies for organic high ranking as well as which pay per click ads appear.
In fact, take screen shots of the ads and preserve them. Keep an electronic file of the searches you did and the pay per click ads that came up. Repeat this procedure each week for a number of weeks (or months, preferably). Compare the ads by company and look for changes.
Now you should recognize that small organizations may not have the resources to do the analysis and may stick with wording that is not as effective as it could be just because they do not know better. Look at the strategies of the big guys in your space. What have they figured out and how have they changed their ads to reflect that knowledge? There you are! Now you have gained market research results with very little of their associated costs. Use that knowledge to fine tune your own paid ads.
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