It wasn’t that long ago (5-7 years) that most people considered the yellow pages book as their primary source for finding local resources. During a few recent talks I have asked the audience to raise their hands if they still used the printed yellow pages on a regular basis and only a few hands went up in each group.

Think about how much easier it is to just Google “Family Restaurants Plano” or “Low Cost Shoes Dallas” than to pull out a phone book and “let your fingers do the walking”.

This brings up another point: According to Google executive Avinash Kaushik the average Google search now consists of 4 words. This is called “long-tail” search, meaning people are not simply typing “dentist” they are typing “pediatric dentist plano texas”

Internet users have become more sophisticated & know that if they are more detailed with their search terms they’ll receive more accurate results.

This bodes well for smaller, local businesses. They no longer have to compete with the big national companies for their keywords, they can focus their internet marketing efforts on local areas and rank well for in the search results for their targeted audience.

Times have definitely changed and the leading small companies in every market have embraced the new rules of marketing and continue to allocate more of their advertising dollars to local online marketing. Have you?

Unfortunately the majority of PPC advertisers are wasting these hot leads by sending them to their website’s home page.

The eager visitor arrives and either (1) doesn’t immediately see what they were looking for & clicks the back button or (2) gets distracted looking at other things on the site and never takes any type of action.

For example, a multi-lines insurance agency has a PPC campaign focused on worker’s comp for small businesses.

A business owner just got a huge rate increase, does an online search, sees the ad & clicks on it.  He’s taken to the home page where he’s now looking at a picture of a family in front of their home and information on boater’s insurance.

If he’s like the typical web surfer, he’ll be gone if he doesn’t find what he’s looking for in about 8 seconds.

Opportunity & advertising dollars wasted.  For some keywords a single click can cost $30 or more.

The key is to create focused landing pages.  Basically a page that is dedicated strictly to that specific search term/product.  It only talks about that one topic and there are no distractions, nothing else for them to do but take your desired action (call, order, request information, provide their email, etc).

Ideally you’ll have more than one version of your landing page and alternate sending visitors to each and test to see which page results in a higher response rate.

Then after you receive a large enough sampling to determine the winner discontinue the underperfoming pages and either ride your winner or continue testing by making tweaks to the winning page and use those changes as your new alternative testing page(s).