Better Conversion Rates Without Google AdWords

For many business people new to the Internet and search engine marketing they see their only option to draw pre-qualified traffic is through pay-per-click advertising such as Google AdWords. This can be a very expensive way to attract a crowd of people. Some people spend their entire marketing budget on this method of bringing visitors to their site. Instead, these new website owners should look to their reporting software to see where their buyers are coming from. Their best source of buyers may not be their pay-per-click campaigns.

Google is in the advertising business. Knowing this fact will help you also understand that Google is not in the search results business. Search results are simply a way to display their paid listings.

Google AdWords is a primary source of revenue for Google. Many millions of dollars are paid to Google monthly to have ads posted across the top and down the side of organic search results. The hope is that users of Google will click on the paid search results instead of the organic results. This will pad Google’s pocketbook and send a pre-qualified visitor to the site.

The problem is that the typical search user is getting savior, smarter and less susceptible to paid search results. More and more search engine users know that the organic results are the more relevant results. These same users also know that the paid results are not the most relevant and that the sites shown have to pay to be listed in the search results.

If the goal of a website is to sell product it is a given that the sites will need pre-qualified visitors to that site. One of the best sources for these pre-qualified visitors has always been Google AdWords and similar programs with Yahoo and MSN.

No other alternatives were thought to be available. However, here are some alternatives that might surprise you to know that have out-produced Google AdWords on 8 of the 8 sites we manage/own.

Live Data Feeds

Both Google and MSN now have live data feeds. These feeds require that you create xml files through a program such as Excel. These files need to be in formats that are acceptable to Google Base and Live Search Feed (MSN). Both services have their own file formats.

Once your file is accepted your items will begin to appear in search results. Your items will rotate through with other items from other vendors who have submitted their own data files.

Live data feeds from MSN and Google Base do send pre-qualified visitors directly to the item. While pay-per-click ads may send pre-qualified visitors to your site, a section of your site or even an item, the items listed in a data feed will send pre-qualified directly to the item on your site. This may be an advantage that data feeds have over pay-per-click ads in that the pre-qualified visitor goes directly to the page where they can purchase the item.

Optimized Landing Pages

Using Google AdWords reports, you should find the keyword phrases most searched for to then create optimized landing pages. If properly optimized, these landing pages will quickly take the place of the AdWords listings in organic search results.

Once your optimized landing pages begin ranking well you will begin to get visitors to your site that are even more qualified than those channeled to your site from your pay-per-click ads.

Articles

Get in the habit of writing articles of a least 500 words and then posting them to blogs and article directories. Make the article interesting and full of important information that readers will find useful. Your articles will get published, read and with the proper links in the resource section, you will receive extremely qualified visitors to your site.

The resource section of your article is usually found at the bottom of the article. You are generally allowed up to 3 hyperlinks back to your site in this section. These links should have your keyword phrases in them or your site name.

The articles will get picked up by other websites and published for others to read. The links you have in the resource section will show as links back to your site, thus raising your rankings in the major search engines.

Be sure and post your own articles on your site to give it more and better content for the search engines to find. Search engines want to see sites grow with relevant content so that the search results provided to their visitors are more relevant. Help the search engines prosper and they will reward you with better rankings.

Be careful to mix things up a bit and not have duplicate content in each article. Change this slightly with each article you post so that the search engines will not think that you are simply copying the same article over and over again.

Better Qualified Visitors Means Increased Conversions

Each of the 3 methods of attracting pre-qualified visitors attracted a better qualified visitor to the sites we own/manage. In each instance these methods had a higher conversion rate that our Google AdWords listings.

In each of these examples we attracted a more qualified visitor and did not spend a dime to bring them to our site. We were able to sell more product through our other marketing efforts than we did through our Google AdWords listings.

Yes, this took more effort on our part. Creating data feeds, optimizing pages and writing articles does take time. However, for us starting out with a small advertising budget it was more than worth the time and effort.

Did we obtain anything useful from our Google AdWords experience? Absolutely. We obtained valuable information from the Google AdWords reports that let us know the keyword phrases to optimize landing pages for and what topics to write articles for. Thanks to AdWords we knew what people were searching for and through our extra efforts we now have highly ranked pages on our site for highly searched keyword phrases. We also now have targeted articles that are channeling extremely qualified visitors to our sites.

I just wish that there had been a less expensive way to learn this lesson.