The beauty about pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns is you don’t have to wait to get website traffic as you do with normal, organic search engine optimization (SEO).  The search engines like Google and Yahoo offering PPC campaigns let you name exactly what search terms you want to be found under, and you can start getting traffic from those searches right away.

Now it seems paradoxical that the pay-per-click phrases reportedly driving the most qualified traffic are not the ones getting the most searches, but here’s why this happens.   When a buyer does a very general search (eg. Toronto real estate), it tells you something about them.  It tells you they’re not really sure about what they’re looking for yet.  They don’t know what they want, and so they’re probably not very close to buying.  Yet you’ll be paying a major premium to be high in PPC search results for “Toronto real estate” since so many competitors want it too.  Sounds like a pretty bad deal to me.

Two weeks later, the people who first searched for “Toronto real estate” would probably have a better idea of what they’re looking for, so they’d refine their search.  By then they might know what neighborhoods they’re interested in.  These people are getting close to knowing what they want, so it’s worth trying PPC ads for these neighborhoods.

The more specific a buyer’s search terms are, the more likely they know what they want and are ready to buy.  So it’s much better to target people who do know what they’re looking for because they don’t need any persuasion.

Another month goes by and now these buyers have done quite a bit of research and looking around.  They now have a very keen sense of what neighborhoods they want to live in, and often even the names of condo, loft or town house developments or street names.  They’re ready to buy very soon or now.

So you should create a vast keyword net to catch these types of “ready to buy” buyers.  You want to be found under as many permutations of local neighborhoods, building/development names, and street names as possible in your farm areas, so make PPC ads for as many as local keyword combinations as possible.  There are tools out there that will help you manage this.

Now the more specific the keywords, the more of them there are potentially (eg. Toronto <Neighborhood A> real estate, Toronto <Neighborhood B> real estate, etc.) and the fewer people going to each one, but these are much better qualified prospects.  The more specific the keywords you setup, the less likely any of your competitors have pay-per-click ads on them, and so the cheaper your ads will be.  When you use very specific keywords such as local street names (eg. Toronto <Neighborhood A> <Local Street Name A>) you will probably get PPC ads for 1 cent per click.  It’s also very easy to input many, many street names and keyword permutations into Google Adwords very quickly.

Imagine getting 1000 highly qualified, ready to buy prospects for a given neighborhood in the next 2 years for $10 in PPC fees!  It’s very possible to achieve this!

Learn more about creative search engine optimization strategies for building qualified prospects in my course Building Your E-Commerce Business.   This course has been approved by the Registrar, REBBA 2002 to qualify for 6 credits.