Tip from the SEO Copywriting Trenches: Using Google AdWords to Perfect Your Copywriting.
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Jim Banks
Web Diversity
As a subscriber to every single paid/unpaid method of delivering traffic, we were really frustrated by the length of time it was taking to test copy on customers' Web sites.
A typical cycle would involve researching keywords, writing the page, going through the normal process of getting pages indexed and then waiting. If you hit things right you might get some feedback inside two months on what search phrases are working, but it was still way too long and riddled with flaws.
With the advent of Google AdWords, we have developed a technique for trimming the process of checking what keywords work, but also the call-to- action sales messages that deliver targeted traffic like heat-seeking missiles. What used to take three to six months to discover can now be achieved in three to six weeks. But it's not for the faint hearted. There are a few wealth warnings that you need to be comfortable with if you undertake this technique. But, we guarantee if you try this technique, it will increase the visitors to your site like you would not believe.
Let's get the wealth warnings out of the way. We suggest you set aside around $200 for your "research." You may not need that much, but be prepared to invest this amount. Chances are you'll get a great ROI on the investment anyway, but consider it R & D and it will be money well spent. The other wealth warning is that if you don't adopt this technique you'll end up paying for your traffic indefinitely. This technique will help you optimize your pages for search engines with killer keywords and the best copywritten sales messages that have been tested using Google, the biggest and best source of traffic at the moment. When you know what works, you can stop buying the traffic and get it the good old-fashioned way, from well-optimized pages.
OK, enough preamble, let's get down to the technique.
Get a pencil and write this down; this is the ingredients list:
- Subscription to Wordtracker
- Subscription to Google AdWords
- Access to Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool
- A long list of the search phrases that you want to use to get traffic
- Four titles of 25 characters or less
- Four descriptions of 70 characters or less
- Guts
Why guts? Well, we are going to suggest you probably try something alien to you. Be prepared to spend a chunk of change if things go horribly wrong. And they can go wrong (they did for us). This technique was tested on our own Web site first to see the sort of results that could be achieved prior to rolling it out to clients.
To protect the results we continue to achieve, we won't divulge the killer keywords for Web hosting. But we created the following three titles for our campaign (we'd recommend four is better, but we are busy people).
Title A: Budget Hosting
Title B: Business Hosting
Title C: UK Web Hosting
We also came up with the following creatives:
Description 1:
On a tight budget? Why not look at our great prices?
Description 2:
UK hosting solutions at affordable prices.
Description 3:
Web Diversity offers Web hosting for UK customers.
Our keyword list had 16 keywords that were suggested by using Wordtracker and Overture. On Wordtracker, we were looking for words that were very competitive in terms of sites competing for traffic. On Overture, we were looking for phrases that had a reasonable number of requests made in the previous month. Feel free to use whatever tools you have at your disposal to glean the keyword list.
We then constructed nine adverts (16 if you chose to do four of each) so we had:
A1 A2 A3
B1 B2 B3
C1 C2 C3
Each ad had the same 16-keyword combination. We also set the daily limit extremely high (wealth warning) to make sure the results weren't skewed by the ads not being shown when searches were requested; impressions were just as important as clicks for us.
We ran the campaign over a three-week period and our overall expenditure was a little over $100. Our objective was to test the technique, not to make pots of cash; our customers will be the ones benefiting from this in ROI.
Our cost per click we set at $2.00, and our daily budget we set at $50 (scary stuff!).
Overall results yielded over 4000 impressions and around 120 clicks for an overall respectable CTR (click through rate) of 2.9%, but what was really exciting were the individual results of the permutations. They ranged from 0.0% (YUCK!) for trial C3 to 7.4% for trial A1. The overall cost per click was a little under a dollar. We also had at the end of the campaign a top-to- bottom ranking of our 16 keywords in terms of number of impressions and, when looking at our sales ledgers, we can see which ads give us the best ROI.
But, this is where the really exciting bit comes in. We then have three crucial ingredients that make for a high-ranking search page so that we're only paying for traffic that yields guaranteed proven results. We have title/description/keyword combinations that give CTR of up to 7.4%, and we don't have to can pages that in three months time don't generate sufficient traffic to justify the bandwidth.
As Google AdWords Select only came into being in February, it's too early to see fantastic results in the unpaid indexes, but we've noticed a marked increase in hosting enquiries. This is nice, but as we mentioned, the technique was developed to help clients identify killer copy and lethal keywords, which we think has been achieved.
The learning points for us were:
- Google prefers the company name in the creative somewhere, so make sure you can shorten it if you have a long company name.
- Results from Overture and Wordtracker are not always 100% right (they are historical generators and can be skewed by current affairs).
- Four titles and descriptions will give better results (some of our results were very close and inconclusive).
- Set your daily budget a lot higher than you probably expect to spend (we throttled back in the early stages and feel it may have had some impact on overall results).
- Dare to experiment; there will be no PR0 de-indexing if you goof up.
- Send your visitors to the exact page where you want them to part with cash/sign up for news or whatever your call to action is.
Next: three steps to success