In his latest episode of the Pest Control Marketing podcast, Andy is answering another question from one of his listeners.
How often should you be updating your negative keyword list?
If you start a brand new campaign from scratch, no matter what industry you’re in, you should be checking your negative keywords every day for the previous day.
If you do not check it every day, you’re literally losing money and you continue to lose money on bad search terms. After about a month or so, you can probably go to weekly, once the search terms get a little bit more refined and then usually around three to six months, you could probably get away with doing it monthly. But you have to make that call based on the search terms and how much of a quality, a search term it is.
Usually, this time of the year is pretty slow and you’re just revamping everything and probably refining some of your marketing strategies. Andy has come up with a holiday checklist on internet marketing. These are the things that you could be cleaning up and refining while business is slow for the holiday season.
Clean Up Your Keywords
You can really clean up your keywords. What about the keywords that have very low impressions or no clicks?
Look at the last six months or a year worth of data and once you realize that a lot of these keywords have not been clicked on, it’s a good time to pause them. Google and the status column will tell you that this keyword has a low search volume so you can easily identify and pause them. Pause the keywords that do not convert. For example, if you’ve got 15 clicks on a keyword at $10 a click, that’s $150, but if you have zero conversions, then it’s probably not converting.
There are some reasons for that. Maybe the keyword is not relevant, or maybe your ad messaging doesn’t make sense or is not related, or maybe the landing page doesn’t talk about that specific keyword. If you can identify an issue there, try to fix it from that angle. If not, just pause the keyword.
Another thing you can do as it relates to keywords is to add more keywords. Use Google’s keyword planner to add more keywords that are related to by looking at Google suggestions. There might be keywords that you hadn’t even thought of, so you could be adding those.
Go Through Your Negative Keyword Lists
Technically we should be doing that all the time. If you haven’t looked at your negative keyword list in a while, because you’ve been busy running a business, then this will be a good time to go to the negative keywords or update your negative keyword list.
Update Your Ads
If your program has been on for a little while, Google gives you some suggestions, especially your responsive ads, on what you should update your title and description to. So go into the responsive ads and just click on an open space for description. And some options will just pop up for you.
You should update your ads to get your ad optimization score up in Google ads. Go to your recommendations tab and you’ll see a bunch of suggestions that Google offers. Depending on whether you think it’s going to be relevant or not, you can apply the majority of these.
So go through them, understand them, see what it is, and then apply them and get your score up. This will make your program work better.
Clean Up Your Landing Pages
If your website is outdated, then maybe now it’d be a good time to revamp it.
However, Andy is more concerned about conversion versus looks. You should pay attention to whether there’s a large phone number on the top; do you flex your reviews above the fold; do you have a chat feature so people can contact you easily; or whether you have a quick quote form above the fold. These things really help with conversion.
If you’re paying for a click, or even if people are coming organically, you’ll want people to contact you as soon and as easy as possible. So look at your website and your landing pages and make some changes there.
Write Blogs
Blogs do bring in a good amount of organic traffic. For search engine optimization purposes, if you have some time, you should go ahead and get five or six blogs written out. You don’t have to post them right now, but just get them all written out for now.
Find the keywords that are being searched the most and write on those topics. And then post them regularly throughout the year. It’s great to be getting organic free traffic as you don’t have to pay for those clicks.
Start A Branding Campaign
You could start a display campaign, Youtube campaign, or a Facebook campaign. Have some sort of messaging and target the right type of people, such as homeowners or people who are in the market for pest control. That’s something that can work well if you know what you’re doing, and you do it well, and you really stay on top of it and refine it over time.
A branding campaign can work extremely well if you do it well enough and it could turn into a lead generation for you. So, try a branding campaign, look into Google display network, Youtube ads, and Facebook ads.