I have a new site that isn't getting any traffic as yet (I admit I haven't submitted it anywhere either as I am still finishing it off) that is in the fairly competitive market of web design so am concerned that perhaps using Adwords might be really expensive for a startup.
Also has anyone here used Adwords to get visitors to their site that have converted to web design jobs or is it really a word or mouth kind of business?
Sorry if this has been covered before (I have tried to search through about 10 pages on this board)
What keywords to use? Well, what do you sell? Who are you looking for?
Does it work for graphic design? It might, but you won't really know until you try. The ad might be great but the site may not convert. The ad might be bad but your site makes up for it. Who knows?
Adwords only costs a nickle a click, when it comes down to it. Yes, you may not appear on the top page for a nickle, but if you are creative about your keywords, you will find affordable, well ranking keywords.
Your best bet is to give it a whirl. What do you have to loes?
>>> get visitors to their site that have converted to web design jobs
Why is the surfer typing that particular keyword? He/She is looking for a service that YOU are offering. Yeah - some of them might be your competitors who are probably looking for a few web design gigs. But don't worry - they won't click on your ad - hopefully ;)
If you are confident that your website is capable of selling your services, then you should go ahead and start a campaign.
>>> Adwords might be really expensive for a startup
Pay what you can afford to. Don't give too much attention to the position of your ad. If you are not getting enough clicks, look for more keywords using Google and Overture keyword suggestion tools.
Yep - keyword research is extremely important. In a competitive environment, it always helps to add keywords and its "variants".
For example -
If your main keyword is "web design", you can probably include -
webdesign
website design
web site design
.
.
.
I can go on and on - but I won't. I will let your imagination take care of this.
Look at your logs and see what searcg terms bring people to your site. Start with those. And brainstorm FROM those words- not just for more adwords, but to get RID of adwords. Negative keywords can be very powerful.
Supopose you decide on "Web Site Design" and you run iut a few days, and you get some traffic, but you get a few people who leave almost immediately, too. Look at those logs, see WHY they are leaving.
In this example, suppose you found out that they were looking for an awards site, a site that gave out web site design awards. Well, that is worthless to you, so make "award" a negative keyword... your number of hits per day may drop, but those are NOT the people you want anyway!
Good luck!
dave
My advice would be to think local, think mispellings, think specific skills rather than just "web design", or designer etc..
It is VERY possible to focus your keywords and only get a couple to a couple hunfred displays a day, but get ctr's of 4, 5 or even 10% (or more).
A quick look at my most competitive adwords shows (for the week):
Clicks 62 Impressions 1250 CTR: 4.9%
With unfocused versions of some of these same keywords, I am sure I could have thousands of impressions a day, and maybe higher Clicks, but would they really buy? I do not know... but these 62 clicks are MUCH more likely to buy!
dave
