I have had a great deal of success in the last week for one of my Search Engine Optimisation clients. Although I have been getting good numbers through the site from the traditional SEO techniques, from a small change in strategy we have had a 500% increase in traffic.

The site is for an online mortgage broker, of which there are Hundreds of in Australia. It is a very competitive market and the difference between success and failure can be down to where your page sits in the google main search page. There are companies using all sorts of tricks to get in the top 5 searches for keywords such as mortgage, home loan and first home buyer. I will analyse some of the specific strategies they use in coming days to help give you some edge against competitors in your specific niche’s. In fact I find that bloggers can learn a lot from how the tradition bricks and mortar companies and dotcoms use search engines.

The point of difference for this client is that they are a mortgage broker that gives rebates to local sporting clubs when their members sign up for a loan. When a customer signs up for finance with them, they nominate their local football or cricket club. Then for the life of that loan the club gets a percentage of the loan amount as a rebate for every year of the loan.

I think that it is a fantastic selling point and gives people a sense of empowerment in being able to help their local community and get a great deal on their finance. There is also a great point of difference in that it is to a sporting clubs best advantage to tell their members about the service and to try to get them to settle any finances and mortgages with them, as the more members that do so the more money goes to the club. However it has been hard to get this across competing head to head with the large mortgage companies in google where you only get 70 characters to say your piece.

Traditionally we were using adwords based around mortgages, home loans etc as well and were having a moderate amount of success, although to get at the top of google we would have to pay around $10 per click, which is an outrageous amount to pay for a single person to look at your site. However you also have to weigh up that in a high commission industry like mortgage broking this kind of money can be worth it if you are having a high conversion of customers dues to other factors and most of all brand recognition. The top players in the industry will do anything to squeeze the little guys out, even if that means making everyone pay $10 plus per click.

This is my google adwords trap #1 : Getting in a bidding war with companies bigger then yourself. I will be writing about these traps over the next few weeks.

The difference in what I have done in the past few weeks is to use a combination of market research, google adsense tools and then target my adwords ads to specific URL’s that get high traffic in the target niche. From my research I determined that there were sites getting 500,000 hits a day in the target market where the cost per click was only about $1. From placing ads targeted to the administrators and managers of sporting clubs on these sites we have increased the amount of click through traffic on the site by 500%. In the future on this site I will be placing step by step instructions on how to think outside the box with adsense traffic and find the hidden traffic generating sites where the competition are too ignorant or lazy to use.

I can definitely recommend the strategy of using targeted URL’s for adwords advertising over just letting your ads run wherever they will appear.

Thanks.

Steve Mills