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For home builders, or plastic surgeons who know anything about SEO, just like the technology in your respective fields, you know it is an always changing field of study that you must constantly keep up on.

So would it be worth, running AdWords for $1,500 a month, if it brought in two new clients you wouldn't have gotten otherwise? (That's a rhetorical question... we think we know the answer...)

Of course, you don't have the time to do it, so that's where we come in, because SEO is in a constant state of evolution, and we read blogs about it every week. But even then, we're only reading a fraction of the blogs on the subject.

But this topic caught our eye because we've seen it work for clients of ours in the home building industry, and we thought we should share it.

Keywords aren't as simple as they seem

When it comes to keywords you think, "Hey we'll just use Google's Keyword Tool, find a handful of keywords we think work for us, call it a day, and live happily ever after."

Well, it is more complicated than that, and here's why:

  • For blog posts and social media:
    If you're using keywords for "on-page SEO," such as on your services pages or your blog posts, you can focus on three or four groups of strong keywords. You want to focus on just a handful of phrases because if you try to use a dozen or more, you may be spreading yourself too thin, and not getting the critical, most highly searched keyword phrases out there enough to move the needle on Google's radar.
  • For AdWords and internet marketing:
    This is a whole level of multi-tiered keywords unto itself. Most casual AdWords users think they can get away with a dozen or so keywords to run Google AdWords. But those folks aren't experts at this, because there can literally be hundreds of keywords that relate to your product or service.

Think hundreds, not dozens, of keyword phrases

What if we told you Google can show you hundreds of keyword phrases that relate to your product or service? It's true.

Take the home building client we talked about. The obvious keyword phrases are "custom home builder Columbus," but once you look at Google's other suggestions, there were about 600 options.

And while there might be 300 searches each month for "custom home builder Columbus" and only 25 a month for "residential builder," you add up enough of those 20-25 searches a month words, and you can have a list of keywords that are searched on a thousand times on any given month.

How can I afford to use 600 keywords?

Good question! It does seems as if you have 500 to 600 keywords, and you're running AdWords on all of them, it would be ridiculously expensive.

And it would be if each keyword phrase cost $2.00 per click. But what if 500 of those keywords cost only 10 cents or less per click? And that is is probably the case. So now, you have keywords that your competitors probably aren't using, and your AdWord budget of $1,000 can cover a ton of those clicks at a few cents per click.

Then look at it this way: if that $1,000 or $1,500 monthly investment got you one new client a month, would it be worth it?

For home builders who make tens of thousands of dollars on each home, it seems the answer would be "yes!"

For plastic surgeons whose average breast augmentation is $10,000, would it be worth running ads for $1,500 a month if it brought you two clients you wouldn't have gotten otherwise? (This is a rhetorical question: we know the answer...)

Now what?

Be smarter than your competitors when it comes to using keywords. Which isn't that tough because most folks don't get into it nearly as much as this.

All this said, using keywords in your content isn't going to help you much unless you publish content that are:

  • worthwhile to your audience, that helps them understand how what you do helps their bottom line,
  • not self-serving, sales-oriented stories which equals boring, transparent efforts to sell yourself, and
  • published on a regular basis. How often you ask? We say, at least as often as those pesky competitors are publishing content.

So there's a lot to the seemingly simple task of finding keywords and running Google AdWords. And if you aren't keeping up on the nuances of SEO and SEM (see the difference between SEO and SEM here), just like with any technological specialty, it's easy to go about it wrong.

And that's where we, as a Columbus web design and marketing firm, can help you. So if you're looking to take your internet marketing to the next level, or at least one level beyond your competitors, let's talk!