New customer acquisition is the driver of business growth. In order to expand your business you can do a few things. You can sell more to your existing customer base. You can raise your prices, or you can go find new customers. The 64 million dollar questions are where and how? The answer is simple, online search. You are the best person that understands your customers. You know what they do, and what they need. Now you need to figure out what they search for so you can get in front of them at the right time. You need to give your business a fighting chance to win that new customer.
Let’s assume your business sells used auto parts in Georgia because your supply would not be sufficient for a national audience. Your search terms should be ones that include the word Georgia, Atlanta, etc. Use the Google keyword tool to find the search terms that best suit your business. This tool will help you find the keywords that your prospects are using to find products that you sell. By looking through the lists that you can create, you can figure out exactly how your potential new customers look for your products and what variations of search terms they use. The people looking at these terms are not necessarily looking for just your business and that makes them a rich target for new customers. They are doing what are called non-branded searches. Branded searches are searches using any part of your business name to find you. While you want to be listed at the top of the search page for your own brand as it has the highest conversion rates, these people are likely already your customers.
Now that you have figured out that non-branded search terms are a potential source of new customers, how do you proceed? There are two ways of getting them. The fastest way is Pay Per Click (PPC). PPC is when you bid on a term in Google or Bing to show up in a good spot. You pay each time a searcher clicks on your ad and comes to your site. This is an excellent process to see what terms may work the best for you to help define your keyword list. I can’t emphasize enough how important analytics are is to this process. Organic search takes a lot of time and a healthy investment for competitive terms. By using PPC for a few months, you can determine the most productive terms for finding new customers that will place orders. Only about 20% of all search engine users click on ads from PPC leaving the other 80% going for the organic listings. The 20% is however is enough to give you direction to determine your keyword list and your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) budget. It is likely that you will also learn that several PPC terms are worth keeping after the research phase as you will be able to acquire new customers cost effectively with PPC. Almost all of our clients use both PPC and SEO to improve their new customer acquisition.
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The next step is to select your keyword list. This is another very important process. Your keyword list should be based on how important the term is to your business as well as the impact to your budget. A term such as “Atlanta auto parts” might be giant term for you, but if your budget is only 1k a month, it won’t leave much if anything to spare. Remember that each term you go after for organic search listings typically creates 50 to 100 variations that can bring traffic. We typically see in a 20 keyword campaign that traffic is generated from 1500+ terms. A normal reading from analytics would read something like 2,400 visitors came from 1,500 search terms. If you have never invested in SEO, it is usually best to pick easy, mid-range, and a few tough terms. SEO takes time and by diversifying your keyword list you can begin to see some results sooner that will start to show ROI. A typical cost of advertising using SEO is anywhere from 10%-50% once a campaign matures past 12 months. The correct investment all depends on the lifetime value of a new customer to your business and your expected ROI from them. The team at Active Web Group would be happy to help you determine your keyword list, budget, goals and target ROI so you can start driving more new customers to your business!
For more ways to improve your customer acquisition process, call us at 1-800-978-3417 or Contact Active Web Group and let us help you!
