Freelancers can use Adwords to reach to their target prospects better. But there are a few strategies freelancers need to adopt which will differentiate themselves form larger companies or agencies providing the same service.
Because freelancers don’t typically have a large ad budget, it’s important to use your ad budget effectively. So each pound or dollar goes further than a large company providing a similar service.
Adwords startegies come into play, but I want to start off by discussing conversion optimisation first.
Conversion optimisation
A conversion is simply the percentage of people who land on your website that turn into a sale. A easy way to improve your conversion rates is that tweak your site or landing page so that you are offering exactly what the user wants. Refrain from offering a wide range of services on a page, ideally build a different page for each service you offer. It’s even better to create a different service page for each of the sectors you support.
An example of this would be, say if you were are graphic designer, you could tailor a web page for graphic design for dentists, hotels and restaurants. Then you can tailor your marketing channels specifically for these industries and land the traffic on the bespoke page.
On the page itself you should discuss graphic design solutions for that particular sector. For instance on the graphic design services for restaurants page you can mention specific requirements for that industry such as menu design, food photography optimisation, store front banner design, branding & logo design services, 3 year free revisions for menu price changes, discounted printing services with partner company etc.
What your essentially doing is building pages tailored towards very specific market segments. So when that particular market segment lands on your web page they are almost ready to sign your contract and hand over their credit card details because you’re offering exactly what they’re looking for.
Long tail Adwords campaign approach
Now if you’ve read the paragraph above already the adwords campaign approach would be pretty self explanatory, it’s simply not worth bidding for keywords like “graphic designer” or “graphic design”. These keywords are usually bid on by large companies who’ve established dominance for those short keywords and get much cheaper ad clicks than you because of their campaign longevity and quality score. What you want to do is shoot for the low hanging fruit, go for keywords like “graphic design for restaurants”, “hotel graphic design”, “graphic design for dentists” etc.
Note: recently google has prevented users from sniping the longtail keywords in this manner, so you will haver to use a variety of different match types, a good one to use is the partial phrase match such as +graphic +design dentists. this will find all the keywords that contain a synonym of dentist with the words graphic and design with them. This should do the trick but can pull up some unusal keywords as well so you need to watch the keyword carefully and use the negative keyword feature to band bad clicks.
Another great way to go for long tail is to target your local town. If you lived in Hull for instance, you could target “hull graphic design”, a lot of businesses and freelancers want to work for a local firm and this is a fantastic way to do so.
Hopefully these tips will help you out, this should give you a rough start on how to manage your Adwords campaign for your freelancing gig. There are other Adwords strategies which I can’t really go on about, maybe another time. If this is still going over your head and almost sounds like a foreign language. You’ll be pleased to know that I’m available for hire. Click on the hire me link, and drop me your info.