As a pest control professional, generating leads allows you to continue providing high-quality services to new customers and grow as a trusted local company.
Nevertheless, lead generation can be difficult, especially for small businesses without a dedicated marketing team and a tight budget. Luckily, pay-per-click (PPC) marketing offers an affordable and fruitful means of bringing in new pest control leads. Given its cost-effectiveness, it should come as no surprise that 87% of small business marketers say PPC is an effective part of their overall marketing efforts.
In this article, we'll explain how to use keywords, website optimization, and common online tracking tools to create and manage a PPC strategy that drives a consistent flow of fresh leads to your pest control business so that you can focus on what you do best – providing quality service to your customers.
Did all those buzzwords make you feel a little out of your depth? You're not alone!
A recent Service Direct survey found that planning and strategy are the biggest search marketing hurdles for 32% of companies. Many small business owners feel overwhelmed and undereducated about the inner workings of PPC marketing.
Fortunately, it's not nearly as complicated as you might think. We've put together a few simple tips that will help you get more acquainted with the PPC system and help you feel well-prepared to dive in and launch your own campaign. And the best part is, once you get started, you'll have a competitive advantage over all those other pest control companies that don't leverage this incredibly effective marketing channel.
Keywords are the foundation upon which your pest control PPC strategy will be built. They determine which ads are shown to which searchers, so you can see how critical they are to an effective PPC campaign. Luckily, you don't have to just guess at which keywords will be effective.
Choosing the right keywords is an important first step to building an effective pest control PPC campaign. So how do you ensure you're selecting winners?
Here are a few basic tips to get you started:
As an expert in pest control, with a deep familiarity with your typical customer base, and these guiding tips in mind, you should be able to come up with a solid list of keyword with which you can begin building your PPC campaigns. Even if you can only think of a few, our next step will help you expand your list and ensure you're reaching as many interested searchers as possible.
One of the most common concerns people unfamiliar with PPC have is that they won't be able to come up with the right keywords. Fortunately, tools like Google Keyword Planner make it easy to expand your list and find the ideal set of keywords – with search data to back it up!
Choosing keywords to target is a balancing act. You want to be sure you include keywords that are relevant to the pest control services you offer and have enough search volume to be worth targeting. However, many of these keywords can be the most competitive and costly, so it helps to also look for some with moderate traffic levels.
The best part is, Keyword Planner can help you get new ideas for related keywords you may not have thought of!
Learning how to build a PPC strategy can be exciting, but be careful not to get ahead of yourself. It's wise to set a firm keyword budget before launching any pest control PPC campaigns. This will help ensure you don't end up overspending and encourage you to allocate budget strategically.
Here are a few common approaches to keyword budgeting:
Even with a clear budget strategy in place, it can be tricky to manage your PCC spending. Google Smart Bidding can help you strike the perfect balance.
With Smart Bidding, Google will use its AI to automatically adjust your bids based on several critical factors, including search keywords, time of day, and user demographics. This ensures that your ads are being shown to the people who are most likely to convert, and as a result, you'll get more clicks for your money.
As we've already mentioned, negative keywords are search terms that Google may think are similar or related to keywords you've selected, but are not actually relevant to your business. You can add negative keywords to your campaign to make sure Google knows not to show your ads on searches for those particular phrases.
For example, as a pest control company, you might want to add the keyword "jobs" as a negative keyword so that your ad doesn't show up when someone searches for "pest control jobs." The point of negative keywords is to help you target your ad so that it's only shown to people who are most likely to be interested in buying your services. This accuracy can also positively impact your click-through rate and quality score, which, in turn, lead to lower costs per click. Talk about a win-win!
Still, many businesses ignore negative keywords simply because they can be time-consuming to research and implement. Some marketers might also think it's not worth the time because they're ads are well-targeted enough through effective keywords.
In our opinion, anything that will improve the accuracy of your PPC ads is worth a little extra legwork. But ultimately, its up to you whether you take the time to include negative keywords in your pest control PPC campaigns.
No matter how good you are at coming up with creative marketing campaigns, they're not all going to be immediate winners. Great marketers accept this and know that, as long as they're monitoring their campaign's performance, they can always make adjustments to improve returns.
With PPC, reporting and tracking are generally based on a few key metrics – most importantly, click-through rate, cost per click, and conversion rate.
It's important to be sure you understand these metrics so you can confidently make informed decisions about your campaigns.
No matter whether you ultimately want prospects to set up a phone call, book an appointment, or just read a piece of content on your website, the goal of every search ad is the same – get people to click on it. This metric measures exactly what it sounds like; out of all the people who were shown your ad, how many clicked on it.
This is an important statistic to keep an eye on, as a low CTR can indicate that it may be time to try a different combination of text and images to better attract your target audience's attention.
Put simply, PPC conversion tracking tells you how many people who see your ad are taking the desired action, like setting up a consultation or dialing your phone number.
This metric is crucial in determining effectiveness of an ad or campaign, and help attribute lead generation and sale revenue to your marketing efforts, helping you understand your ROI.
The easiest and most common method of conversion tracking is adding a short snippet of code to your website URL. This code automatically follows the individual who clicked on the ad and tracks whether they take the desired action.
Google measures the quality and relevance of your ads, keywords, and landing pages with a metric called Quality Score. This rating can have a major impact on both your cost-per-click, and your overall campaign visibility, so it's critical to produce content that Google deems high quality in order to run a successful pest control PPC marketing campaign.
How do you ensure you're content is recognized as high quality? The three most impactful things you an do are incorporate relevant keywords, make and run relevant ads, and create optimized landing pages for your ads (more on that in a moment).
The quality score may have a big impact on your ROI, but it shouldn't be treated as a catch-all metric when judging your PPC success. As with most metrics, it focuses on one particular element and doesn't show the full picture. Make sure you're using multiple metrics when gauging your overall success with pest control PPC.
The last step to building effective pest control PPC campaigns is optimizing your website. At the end of the day, reaching a great click-through rate doesn't mean anything if your website can't convert visitors into paying customers. In that case, you're just paying for clicks that ultimately don't turn into sales, essentially throwing money down the drain.
Be sure your pest control website includes two things: engaging content and actionable calls to action (CTAs). These two elements are essential to converting prospects into clients.
Relevant and engaging content is lets visitors know that they're at the right spot, builds trust in your business, and encourages them to buy your services. Your website content should be clear and concise. Avoid too much industry jargon while also demonstrating the quality of your service.
Be sure to include a CTA prominently near the top of your page. It should compel visitors to take a particular action, like calling your business or filling out a contact form. You can even include multiple CTAs to give visitors the option on how they'd like to proceed.
Your CTAs should be compelling and action-oriented, with a strong sense of urgency. Remember, the goal of your CTAs is to get visitors to act, so make sure they are actionable and relevant to the rest of your website.
Many pest control companies drive their PPC traffic directly to their website's homepage. Unfortunately, in many cases, this creates additional steps for the visitor, which may cause you to lose them. If they clicked on a highly-targeted ad geared toward a specific pest control problem they're experiencing, only to find themselves having to navigate from your homepage to find more relevant information, they may ultimately leave. That's where site pages come in.
86% of small businesses deploy dedicated landing pages exclusively for their paid search traffic, and you should too.
While it may take some extra work, crafting targeted site pages, individually tailored to your specific PPC campaigns, you can create a seamless buyer experience that that is more effective at converting.
As a bonus, individualized site pages can improve your quality score, ultimately reducing your cost-per-click!
Pay per click advertising is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies for pest control companies, yet many avoid it because they don't understand it. Now that you've familiarized yourself with the process, key metrics, and useful strategy tips, hopefully you feel well-prepared to start taking advantage of this powerful pest control marketing tool.
If you're interested in developing a comprehensive pest control digital marketing strategy that encompasses PPC, SEO, social media marketing, and more, check out our Pest Control Marketing Guide!