Convert Offline

What is a person looking for when they go to a search engine and type in:

‘Painter Paramus NJ’ ?

Because of the geographic indicator, we can probably rule out Van Gogh, Mona Lisa and that stuff. So, it is presumably a house painter. But let’s go further… can we guess their intent? Do they want their whole house painted, the interior painted or the exterior painted? I would bet a majority are looking for either an exterior painter or an interior painter. So, If I guess right, will the searcher be more likely to click on my ad? Which one would you click on if you were looking for an interior painter?

Both mention interior… but in the first ad we created the “appearance of specialization”, which could lead to the searcher having a predisposition to doing business with us. The second ad, that is trying to be everything to everyone, ends up being lost in the crowd.

Let’s try another in the uber competitive Insurance industry.

Now here again, we will not get a response from most of the searchers. If they are over 25 they’re lost… for sure. But how about those between 17-24? That group would need to be handcuffed in order to not click on this ad. And here again by targeting them specifically, we should create in the searcher a predisposition to do business with us, which would lead to higher conversions. And if we get a majority of the clicks from one group, that could push the CTR higher than getting a low number of clicks from everyone.

Testing

To use this concept for your business, just try and guess a specific intent of the search and match it with the copy. Be willing to say no to one group, so that you are the one and only choice for a subgroup.

Obviously, with all of the ads shown you will want to create a landing page specifically for that ad. Please don’t take them to the home page.

Then test the CTR with a simple split-test against the ad you’re currently using.

To test conversion, use this concept in a keyword that has essentially the same intent as another one of your keywords, i.e. Home Painter vs. House Painter, Car Insurance vs. Auto Insurance. And then compare the conversions of the 2 ad groups. You will be measuring your ability to create purchase intent on the search page. Which is pretty cool!

Small Business Commando has a very good post on using targeted copy while expanding keywords to get more traffic

***Note - This post was inspired by the work of Kerry Randall, with whom I once spent 10 minutes on the phone and was inspired. That says a lot about him, doesn’t it… and I continue to be inspired by his writing. Tragically, Kerry died in 2005 at a much too early age. His book, anachronistically titled
Win The Yellow Pages War (not an aff link), is as appropriate and inspiring for local search marketing as it is for Yellow Pages.

#1 - Paraphrasing Mike Grehan, author of The Search Engine Marketing Book:

If you create a page about a unique word or phrase, you can easily rank for that term.

As an example, if you were to create a site about xandrough, Google will want to return that site when a searcher uses that term because your site would be the most relevant to that term. The problem of course is that nobody is likely to type that into any search engine because the word does not exist, so ranking for it won’t do any good. However, how about a keyphrase like:

Landscape Design Sussex County, NJ

Now, the possibilities of this concept seem pretty exciting for Landscapers located in Northwest, NJ. To check this, click on the image above and you can see that the sites returned in the organic lack a sense of relevancy. Is that because, like xandrough, it is not likely to be typed into the engine. I don’t think so, as you can see many landscapers are competing for the phrase in Adwords. It actually looks to me like a phrase that is juicily near a conversion worth thousands of dollars.

Try a search like this for your business plus a regional term. If you don’t find many sites that match that query, there may be an opportunity.

#2 - Search Engines Return Pages Not Sites on the Results Page

With this in mind for the example above; the page has to be about Landscape Design in Sussex County, not the site. In other words, if one page on your site is about landscape design and another page is about sussex county, no page of your site will come up for the keyphrase: ‘landscape design sussex county’.

This can be used to the advantage of the linkless site, making it possible to come up in the results for multiple search queries. For example, one page could be for Lawn Maintenance, while another could be Landscape Design.

For more on this see Local Biz Bits

#3 - The Order and Proximity of The Keywords Matter

Write a sentence or phrase that contains both the service and the geographic term and have those terms in close proximity.

High Rankings Advisor has a great explanation of Keyword Proximity.

SearchRank provides another great example of how to write for search engines.

#4 - Time

It will take some time before the search engines trust a linkless site. So, you may just to have to wait. However, if your site is a couple of years old and you re-write it, applying some of these principles, you may be able to rank for your terms as soon as the next time Googlebot visits your site.

To speed some things up even more you may want to add your business listing to Google Maps and verify your business listing. After filling out the information you will recieve an automated telephone call and you will have to enter the numbers they provide you.

Also, you could fill out the business profile on superpages.com. Don’t just set up a listing, you want to make sure you add your url to the business profile… Google only spiders business profiles on superpages.com, not the rest of the site.

The above options are free… the links they provide won’t have any value in ranking your site in search results but they may help your site get indexed quicker by google. And they both get traffic in their own right and could score you some work.