Was It Something We Said?

Part of Vertical Leap’s Managed Search Engine Marketing process includes the reasoned selection of specialised keywords and phrases on your behalf. But can five visits really add more to your bottom line than fifty?

Nobody wants to love their bank. Like most people, you probably just want it to be efficient, prolific – the more cash-point machines the better – and on occasions, sympathetic. Maybe it’s that lack of emotional spark that makes bank advertising so, well, bland, even with the marketing squillions they have at their disposal.

Samuel L. Jackson ranting about a rich man’s gift to his wife; black horses leaping from one tower block roof to another; a taxi driver advising a long-suffering doctor there is ‘Another Way’, through to Donald Sutherland relating a tortuous yarn to a bemused Gary Oldman involving money growing on trees, the nurturing of those trees into forests, how not everyone is fortunate enough to own such a tree in the first place, and how his bank is Fluent in Finance to advise monetary growth. Not what you’d expect at all from your bank then…

Responsible Search Engine Marketing encounters, but attempts to balance, similar fogginess online. When it comes to selecting initial keywords and phrases all business sectors will often wish to be top in general and therefore very popular descriptive terms.

Type ‘banks’ into Google for instance, and you’ll get 18m plus pages served. You think that sounds like stiff competition? Try ‘betting” or any other general derivative of gambling. The problem isn’t necessarily in the volume of similar websites related to a particular category either. Very often general search terms will throw up a litany of wildly diverse offerings – ‘stereo player’, ‘seo firms’, the list is endless, and heaven help you if you were to key in ‘old jugs’ to a search engine…

Very often then, especially with a brand new campaign, the keywords and phrases that initially seemed the obvious ones to target would prove almost invisible if campaigned in a confused virtual soup of clutter and chaos, with the only result being a frustrated client and campaign progression that would be the online equivalent of pushing water uphill and would do little for any return on investment.

From a surprisingly small list of keywords and phrases, Vertical Leap’s fully managed service entails a spread of recommended words and phrases from which to build a campaign on.

Helped by ongoing link-building to relevant websites to establish and grow popularity and page rank, the early days of that campaign will see our client site climbing the search engine results page as the site increases in popularity and visits.

Those initial stages will see the campaign developing often with many more searches on general terms but also a concerted effort to find words and phrases to satisfy niche searches and to dominate that sector totally. Result? From a core spread of researched keywords and phrases, the number of successful searches resulting in visits to a client websites mushrooms exponentially with many times the number of successful searches made.

From a spread of 25 keywords and phrases, a letting agent and client of Vertical Leap is now successfully searched on over 5,000 different words and phrases and the search engine spiders not only index the optimized keywords and phrases, but also visible text.

And the best thing about these searches is that they are becoming increasingly relevant to that client’s core business as by default more motivated visitors to their website with more specific searches into specific regions, towns and even streets in their search terms.

Similarly, a holiday specialist that’s on Vertical Leap’s books is enjoying the fruits of a more mature campaign does well in semi-general terms but again, but is currently scoring and converting increasingly well in detailed and specific searches that are now specifically answered by their website. These enquiries are also a good indicator of which stage of the buying process their potential new clients are at:’ holidays to america’ certainly draws traffic for instance, but the search term ‘fly drive holidays in los angeles california’ gets them top page, first rank positioning, and the business to boot!

Later stages in the campaign sees analysis from Vertical Leap and the refining of those successful keywords and even the stripping out of some that may bring lots of traffic but few conversions as they dilute the overall conversion rate.

In other words, five visits from highly motivated visitors who find just what they are looking for on your site through typing in highly targeted words and phrases and who subsequently convert into paying customers are more profitable now than fifty general visitors who have just embarked on the buying process and are still researching.

So there you have it. Successful online marketing is all about rationalising a prospect’s choices and a managed search engine marketing campaign from Vertical Leap is your first step in achieving that crucial objective.