Kid Carson Media

The other day I was with a potential client here in the Louisville area, and it went the way it usually does. I generally ask the standard how did you hear about us type of questions to see how my own Internet advertising efforts are doing. And I got the same type of response I usually get: “I found you online”.

After I get that out of the way we start discussing what they think they need. The conversation goes this way because I’m a firm believer in letting others tell me their thoughts and then moving on from there. This particular client needed for me to help lower his monthly adwords costs which was in the $200.00 per month range. He was a couple months in and had only sold one small service that he charged $75.00 for so I could see his concern. He simply wasn’t getting a return on his investment, instead he was losing money badly.

After reviewing his keyword selection and making some changes to his ads and the demographics where they were being displayed along with some other basics, I started talking to him about what he was trying to accomplish. And like always at the end he was a bit flustered and also upset with his current web designer.

The conversation went kind of like this.

Me: Mr Customer, now that we’ve got that out of the way can I ask you a few key questions about your situation?

Customer: Yeah, what is it that you would like to know?

Me: Not to sound stupid.. But why are you doing an adwords campaign?

Customer: Well, I thought it would get me some business, and I see other companies doing it so it must be working for them.

Me: How many calls a week do you get from your website?

Customer: My Website? Not that many.. I’ve gotten a half dozen calls from it since it’s been up. Why do you ask?

Me: Well you should be getting a lot more than that, when was it published?

Customer: Oh.. I guess it was October of last year (8 months ago).

Me: Can we take a look at it?

That’s when we go to this customers website and I asked him which pages were the landing pages for his adwords campaign. He had never heard of that so I explained to him what they were… And of course he had no landing pages for his campaign, in the spirit of saving money he’d set it up himself. Then he promptly lost $192.50. Every dollar he lost was lost with the good intentions of saving money. He should have hired a professional, they may have explained landing pages to him.

Me: If you would like I will tell you how you can remedy your situation.

Customer? Please do!

Me: For starters I want to compliment you. You get it! So many small business owners just don’t get it, but you do! The modern consumer is online these days, that’s where they go to research and sometimes even purchase products and services. And you’re making a strong effort to be there, but you’re failing and that’s why I’m sitting here in your office with you today. So I’m saved some time here. Now that we have all of that out of the way I want to address some things that may upset you. And let me preface what I’m going to ask with this statement. “It’s not my intention to see you get upset” but the way I’m going to go with this needs to be done to help you. Is that OK?

Customer: Sure, I need to get this straight because I can’t keep spending money like this, with no return, I’ll eventually go broke.

Me: Great! I see from looking at your website, which by the way should be generating about 80% of your new clients and contacts from it; that there’s a link at the bottom going to your web designers site. Were you aware of that?

Customer: Yeah I seen it there but I assume it’s on all of them they build, I notice most web designers do this, do you?

Me: Absolutely I do! It’s a great source of back linking for my site. Now that we have that out of the way I want to point out some things I’m seeing here, but we will need a small utility to be loaded onto your PC before you will be able to easily understand what it is I’m referring to  Is that OK?

Customer: A utility? What is it?

Me: It’s called Sitemetrics. It’s an SEO extension for google chrome and mozilla firefox. It actually checks the most basic of seo features on an individual webpage. Simply put, it’s the litmus test of your websites foundation for being found by searchers.

After we got it loaded up I showed the client where all of his websites pages were scoring, and the keyword structures compared to what local searchers were actually typing in.  There was no way anybody in his area that was looking for his services was going to be able to find him for the keywords his business was associated with. And as though that wasn’t shocking enough for this pour guy. I took him to his web designers site and showed him that their best scoring page on their whole site only scored 30 out of a possible 100 on the Sitemetrics scale. Yeah that’s right. The company that designed his websites own site was a stinker. A terrible stinker even!  But you couldn’t tell by looking at it. It looked really nice and so did his. If only somebody would ever see them! What a shame!

The client was beyond shocked… You guessed it! He was a little peeved. And he had a right to be.

I took him to a few of my sites and let him put them up against the Sitemetrics SEO tester. Every page he went to, on every site I showed him, which was anyone he wanted to see scored a perfect 100 out of 100 for onsite optimization. He was no less than thoroughly impressed. Then I challenged him to open another browser and act as though he was a consumer to see how well my sites came up for the keywords they were built around. Again he was very impressed. Then we did his, and it was no where to be found. We even looked 10 pages down on googles returns, and nada.

All of this eventually led him to wonder aloud why his web designer never told him any of this. I concluded that they just didn’t know or care about why he wanted a website. There’s a big difference in owning a website and advertising on the internet. Actually owning a website is only a small part of it. And if it’s not properly promoted it just won’t do much.

So I sold him on buying a new domain name that was an exact match for our area and his service. He got it from Godaddy. Then I sold him on a proper theme for his small business from expand2web who I’m affiliated with called SmallBiz. I showed him how it was designed specifically for small business websites and why mine were so successful due to using the platform.

I have a new client! And he will have a website that is findable, with a blog, built in social media, and is mobile ready right out of the box.

In the long run, he’ll save money on internet advertising in Louisville KY

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2012 at 7:19 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.