Generating more web traffic

[Mr Grumpy]

Hello all.

I am currently managing a business that is trying to do more online business and although it has been running for over a year now (the online part that is)it doesn't seem to generate as many sales that I had hoped for. I spend about £200 on SEO per month and have a deal with BT to provide Adwords at about £200 per month, any advice would be appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

Mr Grumpy.

 

[Baz Watkins]

Talk to Old Welsh Guy or any number of other specialists, and put your time and money into what they advise.

For PPC...£200 might not get you very far especially if you are in a competitive market..

BT pahhh... ;-)

 

[Mr Grumpy]

Baz

Thanks for the info.

I do use a professional web company for the SEO. I have been disappointed with BT it sends people to a landing page first and although they can tell me how many visitors to the landing page they can't tell me how many people click to my actual site.

Mr Grumpy

 

[webgeek]

Last time I audited a PPC campaign set up by BT, they weren't geotargeting the searches, for a local business with a 20 mile radius.

The result? A conservatory installer in the Scottish Highlands was getting PPC clicks from people from Southampton to Cardiff.

Perhaps they've improved, but surely a quick review couldn't hurt.

Depending on your business and target market, Facebook ads might work, Bing advertising, or many other possible traffic sources. A bit more info might clarify.

 

[Mr Grumpy]

I am happy to sell anywhere in England/Scotland.

For the money I am spending how many visitors should I be getting to my site?

Do I need to spend more on SEO and Adwords. I have been told that whatever I put into Adwords I should be getting out in orders, but that is not the case.

Thanks

 

[webgeek]

If your Adwords isn't generating sales, then you don't need to spend more.

Sometimes problems with Adwords leading to sales include:
- poor ad copy that attracts people for the wrong reasons
- running the wrong times of day, days of week or locations
- landing page where visitors arrive on site is poor quality, prices are too high, or other turn-off

Adwords test campaigns need to be profitable before thinking about ramping up!!

 

[Mr Grumpy]

Thanks for the advice webgeek. I think I need to review both SEO and the BT Adwords before a plough more money into them.

Thanks.

 

[Alan]

You really need to track your conversion and hence ROI. You need to get to grips with your analytics before making marketing investment decisions.

 

[InternetMarketingPlatinum]

Baz

Thanks for the info.

I do use a professional web company for the SEO. I have been disappointed with BT it sends people to a landing page first and although they can tell me how many visitors to the landing page they can't tell me how many people click to my actual site.

Mr Grumpy

BT are a telecoms company...I'm curious as to why you chose them for PPC?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Normansmith]

BT are a telecoms company...I'm curious as to why you chose them for PPC?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2

BT have more phoenix set ups than Egypt, ufindus, customerstreet etc etc but thought they where out of the PPC market . They used to pick obscure keywords and show you the marvellous rankings they achieved for your website !

 

[Ali-v-8]

SPECULATIONS - Now that i have your attention it would be good for you to all note that the original post has no details about what his campaign or product is.
So lets say for example its "compensation claims" - we can easily say that £200 would last 15 mins (ish) so therefore its not the campaign but the budget.
On another note £200 for a month - for what?

Not enough information is only going to fuel speculation.... More info please.

however - would get a PPC manager as oppose to BT doing it.

 

[Mr Grumpy]

Hello All.

I sell grass cutting machinery and arboricultural equipment.
I went with BT as part of a advertising package. I thought a big company like BT would be great, but i am a little dissapointed.
I don't know a great deal about SEO and Adwords as you can no doubt tell.

Thanks.

 

[Baz Watkins]

Your in a niche market so you might get a return on your investment, it all depends on what you're trying to do. I still maintain the belief that a specialist will get more out of any budget, BT ARE NOT SPECIALISTS...

Before upping your budget, do some testing, you may get away with it (doubtfull), but don't go throwing extra money away until you know what works and what doesn't.

A ppc pro will review and if required reset your campaign to work for what you want to get out of it.

The average pro will want at least 15% of your budget, or if hourly paid anywhere from £25 to £50+ an hour, some will work on results, but they won't be cheap either. You will need to cost for a few hours for a review and then allocate at least 30 minutes a week to management.

In the end you could be looking at £100 to £200 for a review, £50 to £100 pm for management and then your £200 for ads, and thats if you go with someone who charges £25 an hour.

PPC can be a moneypit if not managed properly, and many many business write off thousands each year through poor outsourced management or lack of user understanding of how PPC works.

Get quotes from specialists, choose a preferred option, pay them to review and reset their campaign and be prepared to listen to what they recommend, that way you will have a stronger chance of generating a ROI.

Hello All.

I sell grass cutting machinery and arboricultural equipment.
I went with BT as part of a advertising package. I thought a big company like BT would be great, but i am a little dissapointed.
I don't know a great deal about SEO and Adwords as you can no doubt tell.

Thanks.

 

[atladasmedia]

Hello,

Not sure why all the replies are based on spectulations, sometimes we assume the tree without checking the forrest it belongs to. Yes probably BT is bad for PPC. Yes your budget might be a bit low for this, but what does the data tells you?how many ppl landed to your page? what is the content journey they took? Goal conversion? average time spent on site? On page analysis?

The company I work for have around 2000 visits a month. They spend roughly £1000 on PPC yet they receive 0 business. That is a problem that was mentioned to me few weeks ago. People do click to the checkout page and stop.

I puzzled my heads a lot about it and via data analysis and a couple of techniques we found out 2 problems. 1) when you order the product the page refreshes to the exact same location instead of taking you to the basked page (the product is ADDED to the basket but because it lands on the same page people maybe think the site is broken) and 2)people were not finding a protection gateaway on the payment page thus considering the web site unsecure.

We realised the first problem from landing page data analysis (visitor;s journey via our pages) and the second by addind a chat box to our check out page for those who figured it out.

Guess what...till that realisation the PPC/SEO agency was blamed and fired.

If you can provide full details then you might be able to pint point the problem. You run PPC thus google analytics have some marbles ready for you to analyse. Use em, dont assume

 

[MyHighStreetDeals]

£200 per month for SEO even if it does include this BT Adwords sounds a bit steep I suggest you have a look around at other SEO players and see if they can help you. If you are not getting ROI its time to try other things. Maybe even some of the UK affiliate marketing networks?

 

[webgeek]

What speculation? Didn't everyone do a search on LinkedIn and Google to match the name with the company and line of business? Good grief, it took under a minute...

 

[JonathanSEO]

£200 per month for SEO even if it does include this BT Adwords sounds a bit steep I suggest you have a look around at other SEO players and see if they can help you. If you are not getting ROI its time to try other things. Maybe even some of the UK affiliate marketing networks?

£200 a month steep for SEO.

I hear Groupon spend about £25 / month, you should be able to compete.

 

[atladasmedia]

What speculation? Didn't everyone do a search on LinkedIn and Google to match the name with the company and line of business? Good grief, it took under a minute...

Not sure I follow. ALl I am syaing is that we can not assume what went wrong unless he analyses his PPC data which is the only sort of information that will give him a solid pov of how the targeted traffic is behaving on his web site. Maybe PPC campaign is badly designed or even wrong but how do we know that? what if his landing page is bad? I gave a good example above to describe a similar situation, these things do happen and the worse reaction is to assume what went wrong without analysing the data first.

 

[Websitehandyman]

Fact is if your in a neche market only you have the skills to provide the info any SEO campaign might need to stand any chance. So although you may think employing someone to manage Adwords takes that work of your shoulders that the biggest mistake most companies make. You can only transfer the skills, which although might be 75% of the work from the start, slowly reduces over time or should if you prepared to take it in.

If your last or next "expert" didn/doesn't start by asking you a string of questions and expecting you to provide keywords, phases and other information related to your neche then don't use them and do it yourself.

 

[JonathanSEO]

Hey Mr Grumpy,

I found your website first thoughts are:

1. Cool products

2. Quite a nice site too, lot of good information on it and quite obvious that there's a real life legitimate business behind it. With a few tweaks I think it'd be spot on.

In terms of more traffic then I'd probably need to see how the website performs currently via Google analytics but on the face of it you don't really rank that well for many key terms.

Likely down to a number of factors but you're backlink profile isn't great - a lot of heavy anchor text and directory based links. Would be ok if they were part of a nice mix but it seems to be the majority.

Also £200 for SEO per month is very cheap and you should know what that is currently getting you. I'd hazard a guess at not a lot, that amount of money doesn't go very far so no surprise you're not getting the traffic you want.

A BT pay per click will be a joke too that's for sure. I mean are they even checking analytics to spot opportunities and ways to improve the campaign? I'd guess no. Set and forget with those type of services I'm afraid.

If you want more traffic and sales then I'd focus on doing three things (or find a reputable SEO company/freelancer to do them for you):

1. Producing good content for the site
2. Promoting that content and trying to build relevant links to your site that bring referral traffic and build SEO value.
3. Your product are very high value considered purchases so you need to take a look at various friction points on the site that may prevent customers from buying that's done from both analytics data and via customer surveys etc.

Hope this helps.

 

[Ali-v-8]

If you read atlasmedia's post you will understand my point.

What speculation? Didn't everyone do a search on LinkedIn and Google to match the name with the company and line of business? Good grief, it took under a minute...

 

[astutiumRob]

I hear Groupon spend about £25 / month, you should be able to compete.

I think you missed a "K" off your spend guestimate

 

[Alan]

£200 a month steep for SEO.

I hear Groupon spend about £25 / month, you should be able to compete.

£25K on SEO maybe, but they do spend £80K / month on AdWords according to one tool too
so that is £100k + marketing buget That iss only £1.2 million per annum, which is peanuts compared to their £300million plus revenue.

About 0.3% or revenue on online marketing for an online business - I doubt it - I expect they spend 10 times that.

 

[seo-bod]

What are you getting for £200 a month? Ask them, if you're in a competitive vertical that'll not get you much. Have they created a content marketing strategy, link build strategy or any outreach programs, for that amount I doubt it. Ask for solid evidence of work.

 

[tomkent45]

Why don't you use Google ad words?

 

[clauderodgeor]

If you are looking for quick traffic for your site then you should have to try traditional off page optimization methods. Such as PDF submission, Article Submission, Blog Commenting, Directory submission etc.

 

[seo-bod]

If you are looking for quick traffic for your site then you should have to try traditional off page optimization methods. Such as PDF submission, Article Submission, Blog Commenting, Directory submission etc.

Directory submissions?? Only if you're looking to receive an unnatural link warning.

 

[InternetMarketingPlatinum]

Directory submissions?? Only if you're looking to receive an unnatural link warning.

Sweeping misleading statement...going in a hundred or so established directories is good for SEO.

 

[seo-bod]

Sweeping misleading statement...going in a hundred or so established directories is good for SEO.

Anyone practising low value link building techniques such as directory listings and the other old hat practises will receive an unnatural link warning. Have you not heard of the Panda updates? Google have already devalued directories, article directories and other practises that are similar, do you really think paying $5 to get a hundred high pr listings in directories is going to gain your website traction???

 

[Alan]

There is nothing wrong with putting you business in a few relevant directories or local directories that are used by human beings. After all Google Places is a directory nd every one should be in that This won't necessarily help your site in the SERPS, but it may actually help you get visitors.

As mentioned the 'old hat' techniques of blasting 1,000's of worthless directories is now considered 'black hat' and at best are ignored and at worst earn you penalties.

 

[seo-bod]

Agree with the above - will not help you in the SERPS. And I've never used an online directory though I'm sure some people do though I've never met, spoken and known of anyone who has. Google places fine, so is Google plus and while you're at get a facebook page and interact - is what the low end SEO advice for local generally leads to.