Our clients are busy answering phone calls and working in the field. Contractors don’t have the time to invest in their building company’s online presence, let alone a paid search campaign.
When you’ve already got a lot on your plate, simple PPC mistakes can drain your valuable time and hard-earned advertising budget, leaving you scrambling for leads. But there’s good news: By just doing the basics, your home building business can gain a key advantage over the competition.
Your competitors probably aren’t investing time, money, or resources into building an effective Google Ads campaign, but you’re going to do things differently. If you want to win more leads with the power of Google Ads, you need to keep these truths in mind.
When you’re looking for web traffic and leads, keywords are your biggest asset. But without the right keyword strategy, PPC can be a money-sucking mistake for home builders.
Why? If you’re targeting the wrong keywords, you won’t reach your target audience. Let’s say you’re targeting the keyword contractor for your newest PPC campaign. You set the target to your service area in Cleveland, OH, sit back, and wait for calls to come pouring in.
But what if someone searches for contractor digital marketing in Cleveland? Chances are, they’re not part of the target market for your home building services. Still, you might show up on the search engine results page for those users—and you risk paying for clicks from searchers who won’t ever hire your company.
So, what can you do? Keyword research is key to a successful PPC campaign, but you’ll always need to consider how keywords might be used by searchers. To stop serving ads for irrelevant keywords, you’ll need to play around with keyword match types. Hint: You need to start targeting more keywords—and that means telling Google which keywords you don’t want to show up for.
At the end of the day, negative keywords can make or break your PPC strategy. When you enter negative keywords, Google excludes those search terms from your campaigns so you only focus on the keywords that are relevant to your target audience. Hyper-focused targeting not only serves your ad to more qualified leads but also boosts your return on ad spend.
How does Google serve your PPC ads to local homeowners? First, searches are based on the actual location the searcher enters. For example, a searcher in Denver, CO, will search for home builders in Denver CO. Then, Google will provide a list of local home builders, sorted by their distance from Denver.
The second way a searcher looks up the term home builder doesn’t involve a location-specific search. Even when a searcher doesn’t specify the city in the search query, Google still provides results for home builders in Denver, CO. That’s right: Google takes the location of the searcher into conversation every single time.
That’s why geotargeting is a no-brainer. Geotargeting, or local PPC, lets you serve search ads only to customers in a certain location, or a set of locations, that you specify.
With geotargeting, you won’t have to worry about draining your ad budget on wasted clicks from people outside your service area. At the same time, you’ll boost the chances that the people clicking on your ads are actually qualified leads. When you deliver ads to people in specific areas, you effectively build brand awareness in that area and make the most of your PPC budget.
To drive traffic to your website, your ad copy might say something like, Get a free quote on a custom home renovation if you call by July 31. When a person clicks, they’re directed to your Home page—where there’s no mention of any discount. Your visitor feels tricked and leaves your website, but you’re still paying for the click.
Here’s another far too common scenario. You’re advertising kitchen remodels, so your description in your PPC ad copy mentions kitchen renovations. Once again, the searcher is directed to your Home page, which briefly mentions kitchen remodeling. Your searcher is specifically looking for kitchen remodels—and you need to give that information to them easily, quickly, and clearly by linking your ads to topic-specific landing pages that are designed to convert.
[highlight]The secret to conversions? Put the time and effort into creating irresistible landing pages for every service you offer. Our clients tell us that well-crafted landing pages play a key role in their website SEO, generating more organic traffic. What’s more, creating more landing pages (and serving different pages to segmented audiences) can maximize your conversion rate.[/highlight]
Make sure your target keywords and messaging are consistent with your ad copy. Then, top your landing pages off with compelling calls to action to persuade your visitors to take action.
Whether you’re a Google Ads newbie or a seasoned marketing pro, you already know that there are thousands of settings and combinations for building PPC campaigns. How can you pinpoint the right settings and combinations for your contractor business?
Just like every other marketer, you need to experiment. You’re not going to master the art of paid search overnight. Instead, your success depends on how much time you’re willing to dedicate to your campaign. Launching your campaign is the easy part, but continually adjusting your budget, reviewing your progress, and tweaking your settings is the secret to Google Ads success.
How often should you check on your campaign? In the beginning, carve a few minutes out of each day to review your performance. As the data populates and you start tweaking your campaign settings, you can review your campaign weekly.
If you don’t have time to sacrifice away from the field, consider hiring a marketing partner. Instead of playing around with Google Ads settings and hoping for the best, an experienced marketing team can make paid search a profitable marketing strategy for your home-building business so you spend more time doing what you love.
Google Ads can give your contractor business a competitive edge, but it’s not a standalone strategy. From home renovations to building, your clients are searching for premium services and large-scale projects. Your target audience is well-researched and educated. They’re making elaborate purchases, not impulse buys.
What does that mean for your marketing strategy? Simply put, you need a comprehensive, long-term strategy to win clients, complete with different entry points and multichannel communication. You need to leverage social media, email, referrals, SEO, and other marketing strategies to win their business—and relying solely on Google Ads to generate leads isn’t going to sustain your business.
With that said, using Google Ads while ramping up other components of your plan can be an effective strategy. A well-rounded marketing solution can help you build brand awareness, retarget lost leads, and use content to educate them throughout the buyer’s journey. Then, when they’re ready to start their next project, you’ll be the one they call.
Just like everything else in digital marketing, PPC trends are constantly changing and evolving. If you want to stay ahead of the pack, you need to keep tabs on the latest PPC strategies. On top of that, you need to test and optimize your campaigns to maintain a steady stream of leads.
Ready to take your paid search strategy to the next level? Whether you’re building your first Google Ads campaign or trying to maximize your ROI, we’re here to help. Contact us today to do PPC marketing the right way.
