The Plan
She wanted to teach guitar! She set up a small studio in her basement. Her marketing plan would be a website that would allow people to get to know her and her teaching style and then sign up for lessons. She had designed sites before, so creating a few pages and publishing them to the web wouldn’t be too hard. With a little help from a friend who was a graphic artist, she had the site just the way she wanted it. The site was soon up and ready for business. All that was left was to watch the students roll in. She had great expectations!
One Year Later
Time goes by. The goal was to have ten students on the books, but a year later, only one had come in from the website. What was wrong? Why didn’t the site work? How could she fix it? She considered advertising on Google but didn’t know where to start. She bought a book on Adwords but the process seemed too complicated. Where could she turn for help? Just then she found a post from a Facebook friend who had become a certified Google Adwords Expert. New clients were offered a free website audit. Maybe this was what she needed. She contacted her friend and scheduled an audit.
Back To Basics
The results of the audit were shocking. She found that a big problem was the site was not user friendly. She had built the site to her liking, not to what her clients needed. Also, she was confronted with a list of terms she didn’t understand. Terms like landing page, blogs, keywords, negative keywords, maximum bid, campaigns, ad-groups, search query, organic results, ad placement, quality score, ad-rank, cost-per-click, click-through-rate, and match types. They set to work revamping the website by creating landing pages, writing blog entries and putting the Adwords campaign in place. It didn’t take long to see the results of their work. Students started to sign up for lessons. Once again, she had great expectations!
Too Much Of A Good Thing
Success can come with it’s share of problems. She now had a new group of students to attend to which took a lot of her time. Over the course of the next few months she noticed traffic through the site seemed to be slowing down. New students stopped coming in. She was puzzled because she hadn’t changed anything with the site or Adwords. What happened!
Once again, she contacted her friend from Facebook, who advised her to hire someone to monitor the account. Adwords, and WordPress are not “set it up and leave it alone” programs. WordPress and it’s supporting plugins need to be updated regularly. Adwords programs need attention because your competitors are changing their bids to get the best ad placement. As they move up, you can move down, or even off the first page of results. Also it is very important to use the negative keyword feature of Adwords to make sure your ad is only shown to the people who are looking for what you offer.
Adwords Monitoring Produces Results
She took her friend’s advice and set up the monitoring account. Over the next six months the account was fine tuned to attract more of the clients she was looking for. Cost was reduced by using negative keywords to weed out unnecessary clicks and eliminating ads in areas that didn’t produce results. Keyword quality scores are now up as is her click-thru-rate. Most important of all, new students are signing up for lessons.
Today, she has all of the available student slots full, and has a waiting list of students to start lessons. She is a very happy guitar teacher who exceeded her great expectations!
A few points to take away from this story:
1.) If you build it they don’t always come. There is a tremendous amount of competition on the internet! You need to utilize the proper tools to get noticed. If you do nothing, it can get very lonely!
2.) If you build it wrong, they won’t stay! When someone clicks on an ad, they expect to find what they are looking for. If it’s not there, they hit the back button and are gone!
3.) Adwords and WordPress work very well together to drive traffic to your site but are not “set it up and forget about it” tools. When used correctly they can, and will, allow you to reach your own great expectations!
I will be expanding on these points in coming posts so please check back soon!