The Boss of You

In last week’s Ask the Boss Ladies post, Kim asked what our thoughts on paid Search Engine Ads (like Google AdWords) or Paid SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was the better way to go. Not knowing a tonne about your business Kim, I’m going to try to make this advise pretty general so that it hopefully applies to you and to some others out there.

For starters, I’m going to outline a few assumptions here:

• First, by choosing to pay to get eyeballs on your website, I’m assuming that your website either directly (through e-commerce) or indirectly but pretty darn quickly (say a portfolio or consulting site) will help you generate income.
• Because you’re asking about search engine optimizing or paying for search engine ads (basically paying to show up well in search results) you’re currently not showing up very well in so-called “natural” searches for some the keywords your clients/customers are likely to be searching on.

Running with that first assumption, the best way to evaluate either of these means of improving the likelihood of folks finding your through searching is to keep a solid and realistic eye on what the Return on Investment (ROI) is going to be. In fact, it is this ROI that makes me lean ever so slightly towards Google Ads (or other paid search ads) as a starting point, as they allow you to set up measures that can actually (in the case of having a shopping cart on your site) show you the financial return you’re getting on your paid ads. That said, if you’re not showing up well in natural searches, you may want to consider some SEO all the same, as continuing to pay for search engine ads for the life of your business may not be the way you want to go, but more on this in a minute.

If you do choose to dip your toes in the world of Google Ads, I highly recommend doing a bit of reading on the terrain before you jump in with both feet. A web search on “setting up google ad campaigns” will offer you a fair bit of guidance and Google’s own website is pretty good with the tips as well. One of the other great things about Google Ad campaigns is that you can really be pretty conservative in your initial trials starting with very small amounts of money in play (like a $1 a day). If you are paying for really popular terms like “lip gloss” you may find that a $1 isn’t going to take you very far mind you, but unlike buying an ad in a glossy magazine, paid search engine advertising does let you have a bit more control over your budgets. The other thing to keep in mind with Google Ads is targeting and specialization. If for example, the term you want has a lot of people vying for it (Google will tell you this in giving you information about what your minimum bid on the word or phrase would need to be) try a more specialized variant that applies to your product, so perhaps “hemp lip gloss” and see if that lowers the cost of entry while also helping you limit the search traffic to people who are searching for a product that really matches your own quite closely. The other aspect of targeting is changing the content of your ad based on the keywords you are using. Going with my earlier example, say you sell hemp based beauty products on your website, set up your ads so that the keywords associated with lip glosses and balms relate to those products specifically, while the cleansers talk about “Perfect for sensitive skin” or what-have-you. Keep in mind that whenever someone is entering a search term they are looking for results that most closely answer the question they’ve got on their mind, ie/ “who on the internet has the best/reasonably priced animal friendly organic facial cleanser?” While you can’t read people’s minds, you do want to take this opportunity to try to convince them to check out what makes you so special. The next piece of the specializing puzzle is to also use separate URLs for each ad group, by which I mean making sure your cleanser ads link directly to your cleansers page, and your lip gloss ads to the lip gloss page if at all possible. As with most things on the internet, you’re trying to get people somewhere in as few clicks as possible. This is especially true with e-commerce.

So, maybe you’re not to sold on ads, or you’re really concerned about your search engine ranking in general and want to get some SEO expertise on  your site. Google, again, offers some really excellent information about SEO, which I must insist that you read before you consider hiring or set out to hire an SEO specialist. Unfortunately, there are a number of less than above board folks out there offering SEO services, and a bad SEO campaign (ie/ one that uses nefarious techniques to artificially push up your ranking so you see quick results and are happy with your SEO consultant) can actually negatively impact your search engine placement quite significantly. So caveat emptor when it comes to hiring SEO folks. Now that said, there are many excellent and honest SEO consultants and firms out there — it is in fact a service we offer to some of our clients as well — in the case of a smaller business I would say you should be able to get a basic SEO package that you can realistically envision seeing a decent ROI on. You may actually be able to set up some measurable means of guaging the success of an SEO campaign on your bottom line by watching your sales (seeing if they go up) and also watching your search engine referrals to see if they go up at the same time. Keep in mind that SEO — when done properly — can take a while to have an impact, so have patience and discuss how long your consultant expects it to take to see results. Now for most small businesses, I would recommend finding an SEO specialist who is also willing to provide you with some basic training so that you can apply many of the day-to-day techniques on your site — ie/ how you enter content, tag images, etc. — yourself and not be paying a specialist all the time.

I’m going to say it again, but really I can’t stress this enough: whether you go the route of PayPerClick ads like Google Ads or decide to hire an expert for SEO you must make sure that you’re going to see a reasonable return on your investment.