On some occasions I have had lawyers contact me through the use of a pay per click online advertisement within one of the search engines. Upon reviewing the content within my site they will invariably digest information as to why I believe pay per click advertising is a wasteful and counterproductive use of their financial resources. Monies that benefit only the search engine companies at the expense of the lawyer’s bottom line.
Such lawyers after reading my views on the subject quite justifiably ask me, “if pay per click advertising is such a wasteful investment, why am I on it?” The direct answer; keyword research.
In my former writings on the subject I express my thoughts as to how Google initially invites participation into their respective services through free valuable online tools only to later take them away. Once one relies upon a certain search engine and is accustomed to using it, Google knows that the chances for the consumer or business customer to revert to a different search engine experience is limited.
For example, Google formerly offered a “keyword volume tool” that could provide business customers the means to simply and efficiently determine the best keyword terms to focus on to grow their respective businesses.
For the purposes of this article, Google sees no relative benefit to providing this sort of meaningful business information to potential pay per click business customers any longer.
Businesses or lawyers such as myself used such tools to focus our website optimization efforts accordingly. Such efforts were used by those small businesses savvy enough to utilize these resources in a manner to enhance their own organic (free) website listings. While Google claims that they reward websites that provide the best online user experience for the consumer, this reward is usually only reserved now for national companies that are not the small business target market user for pay per click advertising.
Google has now taken offline its former keyword volume tool. What information is shared is often difficult to access or otherwise inferior to the keyword informational research available before.
By limiting the tools and information by which to achieve free organic website success, Google has continued its efforts to drive small businesses into its pay per click revenue stream.
Continued offering of free keyword research tools was obscuring needed focus upon pay per click marketing as a consideration for the small business online advertiser. If enterprising lawyers or businesses could continue to learn what keyword terms to focus on and what terms to avoid, organic website efforts could continue to be used to effectively focus only upon search terms actually used by the consumer. Needless to say, this focus on targeting a website for organic (free) listing website ranking success runs counter to Google’s desire to compel the online business toward the use of an all inclusive keyword pay per click marketing strategy.
The significance of this to the search engine companies is that financial outlays of advertising revenue that could otherwise be thrown at pay per click services were being driven toward efforts to build websites geared to optimizing the most relevant consumer search terms for their given business within free online rankings.
It goes without saying that this type of business focus on free organic marketing through website activity fixated upon search engine optimization runs counter to Google’s self interest in enhancing its vital pay per click revenue stream.
In order to counter this relatively recent Google activity adverse to the interests of the business marketer, new ways needed to be found to acquire the valuable information necessary to best prioritize online marketing efforts. Ironically enough, the best new informational tool I have uncovered is the efficient use of pay per click listings, not as a means to effectively market my website, but to once again effectively acquire the keyword term information my potential consumers were inputting into the search engines.
In this manner, my pay per click account information has been used to restore my ability to provide the needed informational resources available to bolster my free organic online marketing efforts and not Google’s pay per click listings. Because my website is considered a top ranked informational resource valued by Google I pay very little per click on purpose yet still achieve high pay per click rankings. This allows me to accumulate the critical information necessary to determine what keyword search terms lawyers who could benefit from my direct mail services were accessing.
The key distinction is that my use of pay per click is to access information and not acquire potential clients. Client volume comes from strengthening the optimization efforts of one’s core website so as to achieve top free organic listings within the online search engines. As such, knowing the keyword terms I must target enables me to focus and prioritize my online marketing efforts toward strengthening my own website at the expense of Google’s pay per click bottom line.