Search Engine Marketing Strategy for Service Providers
In business today, there are essentially two types of service providers. Those who can easily provide their service in a virtual world – web developers, writers, consultants – and those whose work is much more grounded in reality – like painters, plumbers, and chiropractors. While virtual service providers were among the first to realize and embrace the global commerce opportunities created by the web, many real-world service providers have struggled to discover exactly how the internet can bring serious value to their local and regional businesses.
Until recently, local businesses had an unparalleled partner in the Yellow Pages, mainly due to the fact that those in need of service had nowhere else to turn. As many are now realizing, that's no longer the case. The Yellow Pages are rapidly losing value due to the growing accessibility and convenience of the web. Coupled with the Yellow Pages' exorbitant advertising rates, it's become imperative that local businesses find better ways to reach new customers and employ more effective long-term solutions.
There are a number of tactics one can use to pull in customers online, but none so effective as simply being in the right place at the right time – a search engine’s results page. A search engine page is generally split between organic, non-paid results and paid advertising, both of which are highly effective ways to pull in web site traffic. The trouble for many service providers is that even when they have a good idea of what needs to be done – search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) – they lack the time and experience it takes to develop an effective search engine marketing strategy from the ground up.
No matter what your plan, every search engine strategy requires a solid grasp of the keywords and search terms that will wrangle in the most relevant traffic. The system described here will show you how to break down your service business and discover those terms, beginning with a basic list of core terms and finishing with a final list of thousands of search terms suitable for categorizing and implementing in a new Google AdWords campaign.
The First List: Core Keywords
When customers seek out real-world services online, they search for what they need based on one or more of four basic criteria:
- Their location
- The issue at hand
- The service or solution they already know they need
- The type of provider they already know they need
For example, a marketing director in Madison, Wisconsin, looking to have a new web site developed might go to Google looking for a madison web site developer or web design wisconsin. Both madison and wisconsin reference location, web and web site reference the issue at hand, design references the solution or service, and developer references the provider. By generating a small, but comprehensive, list of core search terms in each category, you will begin to get a handle on what keywords are most likely to drive relevant search traffic to your site.
Here’s an example of what the core keyword list might look like for my company, Astuteo:
| Location | Issue | Service | Provider |
|---|---|---|---|
| Madison Madison, WI Milwaukee Chicago 53703 Wisconsin Midwest | Web Web Site Website Content Creative Search Engine Brochure Advertising Ad Campaign Logo Identity | Design Graphic Design Development Strategy Optimization Marketing SEO | Company Companies Designer Designers Developer Developers Strategist Strategists Professional Professionals |
Important Considerations: When determining LOCATION, it’s important to cover the many different ways a person might try to find you, so make sure to list all the major neighborhoods, cities, zip codes, regions, and states your company serves. ISSUE refers to the issues, problems, and situations that your company deals with. Make sure to list any obvious variations and alternative spellings (for terms such as web, web site, and website). When listing SERVICES, it’s important to list both one-word terms like design as well as slightly more descriptive forms like graphic design as a little overlap is better than missing a major search component. For PROVIDER, list both general provider descriptions, such as company, and specific provider descriptions, such as designer. It’s also important to list the plural forms in addition to the singular forms because a search engine user may search for madison web design companies instead of madison web design company.
The Second List: Core Key Phrases
After your first list of core keywords is fully developed, you can use it as a reference to develop your second list: core key phrases. This list consists of the Top 50 search phrases that best describe your business and the services it offers. It’s somewhat of a subjective process, but the goal is to assemble the top key phrases that you believe will bring the best prospects and most relevant customers to your site.
Once complete, this list functions as particularly good resource for measuring the overall movement of your website within search engine results. Search engine ranking software, like the incredible program Advanced Web Ranking, has the ability to emulate manual searches within the search engines of Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and more. In a nutshell, the program tells you exactly where your site ranks for each of your core key phrases. This allows your company to gather and maintain accurate web site positioning reports as changes are made to the content of your web site. This measurability and insight will prove invaluable when it comes to marketing to your specific customer base.The list also provides you and your web development team the additional guidance of a short, yet powerful, list of phrases to incorporate into the content of your website. Each month, Astuteo.com receives an increasing number hits for phrases like website design madison wi and madison graphic design – both of which appear on Astuteo’s own list of core key phrases. As you expand your company’s web site over time, this continually evolving phrase list will help you develop ideal content for your site and reach an ever-increasing number of highly relevant potential customers.
The Third List: Comprehensive Key Phrases
Lists 3 and 4 – the Comprehensive Key Phrase list and the Categorized Paid Search list – are designed for search engine marketing (SEM), as opposed to search engine optimization (SEO) like the previous two lists. Whereas the first two lists defined the basic terms necessary to paint a clear picture of your services online, this list and the next will help you develop the intricate “fishing net” of terms you need to catch as many relevant customers as possible via paid search marketing.
The main problem most beginners have when venturing into Google AdWords is the development of an effective keyword list. Many novice campaign managers put together keyword lists that are either too small, too general, or far too popular. This results in an expensive campaign that generates little to no return on investment (ROI). Successful AdWords campaigns will generate large numbers of highly relevant, relatively low-cost clicks and lead to what is often an incredibly high ROI. The universal characteristic of these successful search engine marketing campaigns is their well-developed keyword lists.
To generate a keyword list suitable for effective SEM, you’ll need a simple application known as a phrase list generator. There are a number of them available for free online – one of the best I’ve found so far is the Keyword List Phrase Generator from seobook.com. Using your first list – the Core Keyword List – merge the following sections, copying and pasting the results into a new text file after each step.
| Merge | Example |
|---|---|
| Location + Issue Location + Service Location + Provider Location + Issue + Service Location + Issue + Provider Location + Service + Provider Location + Issue + Service + Provider | (madison website) (madison design) (madison designer) (madison website design) (madison website designer) (madison design company) (madison website design company) |
I’ve included the Location field in every list because it’s a defining characteristic of a real-world service and it’s essential in developing a distinct list of key phrases. For example, a plumbing company in Chicago is far more likely to reach relevant customers with key phrases like chicago plumber and wicker park plumbing company, than with a general phrase like plumbing company. You will run into some overlap when certain terms are merged (i.e., website web development developer), but you can easily weed these out using the “find and replace” capability found in nearly every text editor and word processor.
By the end of this process, you will have turned a short list of keywords and a minimal amount of work into a new list of literally thousands of highly relevant search terms. This list of comprehensive key phrases is a nearly perfect foundation for your Google AdWords campaign or any other search engine marketing effort.
The Fourth List: Categorized Paid Search
The final key component of effective search marketing campaigns is the utilization of campaign categories. By breaking your marketing campaign into a number of specific categories, it makes it much easier to analyze the results and home in on what’s working well for you and what’s not.
Before breaking your latest list into categories, however, it’s important to “wrap” each key phrase for even greater effectiveness. Google AdWords has three primary keyword matching options – broad match, phrase match, and exact match – each one progressively more targeted in scope. The terms generated in your third list are already in a broad match format, since broad match requires no wrapping at all. Phrase match, however, requires that each phrase be wrapped in “quotation marks”, and exact match requires that each phrase be wrapped in square brackets [like this]. Fortunately, there’s more than one free AdWords wrapper out there that will do this work for you. Simply copy your last list in its entirety, paste it into the wrapper, and viola! – you’ve got your fourth and final monster-sized list of wrapped and ready-to-market search terms.
All that’s left to do at this point is break your list down into specific ad categories and drop those categories into your search engine marketing campaign. I typically categorize my clients’ AdWords campaigns by both location and service – Madison Graphic Design, Madison Web Design, Madison Advertising, Chicago Graphic Design, Chicago Web Design, Chicago Advertising – because it gives me a good idea of what services I’m marketing successfully and in what locations. That said, feel free to break your own list into as many categories as you see fit, as the more specific your categories are, the more specific your data will be. The level of detail needed to successfully operate a paid-search marketing campaign varies from one client to the next, but hopefully after going through this process, you’ll find greater success no matter what your final structure.
And if all else fails? Well, you can always hire Astuteo.
