31 Dec Eliminating PPC Ads for Contractors Using Data
Contractors often run PPC ads in order to generate more traffic to their websites. This is often because they, or their agency, does not understand how to identify and traget the most valuable searches for their business organically.
Here is an example of how we are doing this for a contractor.
In 2018 they generated 194 leads from their website. They spent $72k on ads.
In 2019 (after hiring us) they generated 743 leads from their website. They spent $0 on ads.
In 2020 they generated 2,000 leads from their website. Again they spent $0 on ads.
Our data-driven strategies for clients include much more than just SEO. One of the biggest opportunities for contractors is search engines so we will explain how we help our clients dominate search results organically and eliminate the need for PPC ads. In fact, we have eliminated the need for PPC ads for 100% of our clients.
Step 1 – Build Dashboard
In order to be more effective we need data. We need data to see how we are doing and we need data to see how our client ranks in the most valuable searches online. We need data to see how our clients’ competition ranks as well. We need to know how many leads our client is generating and where they are coming from.
There is actually much more in our client dashboards. The main thing to understand is that we help our clients by using data to create results.
Step 2 – Research Search Phrases
This is the most important task. It is not like advertising with PPC ads where you simply target a bunch of keywords. You have to determine what the most valuable searches are for your business. It is much easier said than done.
We use data from Google when we are doing research related to searches. Why? Because they are the experts on searches and search engines. It takes a lot of doing as you try to eliminate the guesswork from the research. Once we narrow down the searches to less than 6 we look at “intent” of the people searching. This is more complex and requires further data. This step is different for each client but what we are looking to do is to narrow down the searches to those with the most desirable intent from the users. Tough to do, right? It is tough. It takes looking at a lot of data. If, for example, our client is looking for people who are looking to hire a particular type of contractor then we use this as the intent. It is a complex task and can sometimes take running experiments.
Step 3 – Target Search Phrases
Once we have determined the best searches we then optimize our client’s website to show up for those searches.
Actually, it is more complex than that. We take the searches and then focus on specific locales in which to target. For example, if our client is in San Diego then we want to target people who are looking to hire a home builder in San Diego. It doesn’t do us any good to generate leads from New York.
So it is a combination of the most valuable searches and the most desirable locales.
Step 4 – Setup Tracking in Dashboard
Here is a screenshot of the section in our dashboard that we use to track organic rankings for our clients and their competitors.
Section 1 – Keywords Covered
This section shows us how many of the searches that we are monitoring for this client in which they rank organically. It also shows the same info for this client’s competitors.
Section 2 – Avg Organic Rank for Google
This graph shows what the average organic rank is for all of the keywords that we are monitoring. It includes our client as well as all competitors that we have chosen.
Section 3 – Rankings Broken Down for Client and Competition by Keywords
This interactive portion of our dashboard allows us to see how our client ranks organically for each search phrase and location. It also shows us how their competitors rank for the same searches. It is very interactive. We can select a column and sort the data.
Step 5 – Make Improvements (Monthly)
We then use this data in order to easily see which keywords we need to make improvements for. By automating this data we can make more efficient use of our time for our clients. We are constantly making improvements for our clients. One thing that we often do is to run “experiments” in which we make modifications to certain elements on their website and then we track how the changes are reflected in the searches by using this data. It works well.
Summary:
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Achieving great results takes time. We are thrilled to say that we have been very successful in achieving amazing results for our clients.
If you want to see one of our dashboards and learn more you can let us know here: