Designing a website is a bit of a chicken and egg conundrum. Many build a website taking the easy road using a flawed design-led ‘build it and they will come’ philosophy. Unless you have something VERY unique to offer, the website will rarely pay for itself let alone provide long-lasting, meaningful returns.
A better, yet more challenging, approach is to define who your customers are, what they are looking for and how you will reach them. Then build a website to support that. For our recent client LocksOn this approach proved to be the more profitable for their business.
The Challenge
LocksOn provides a high-quality locksmith service to residents and businesses on the Central Coast of NSW. Google Ads had proven worthwhile at getting new business but was getting expensive. Higher Costs per Click (CPC) indicated a more competitive market than ever before. Everything that could be done within Google Ads had been done using the existing website. It was time to redesign the website to not only to lower the CPC but focus on improving the overall Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
Step 1: Knowing your customer’s online behaviour
The process of building an effective Google Ads campaign, in the end, comes down to how connected you are with what your customers are searching for that relate to services you offer. Simple in principle but this requires effort to be put into practice. Apart from extensive research, you also need to know how to structure the content and flow of your website. Call it customer-centric or user-centric design, at the end of the day your website needs to be a natural extension of your customers search query.
Step 2: Getting your house in order
Practically speaking, if your keywords, ad groups, ad copy and website copy is not 100% aligned you will pay more for less when it comes to your advertising spend. This is known as your Quality Score and it has a major impact on your Ad Rankings. You could pay significantly more yet appear below a competitor if they have got their own house in order. Google’s algorithms simply reward relevance and penalises irrelevance.
Step 3: It’s not all about the robots
While Google’s Ad robots determine your relevancy, a website still needs to be designed for humans. Humans are emotional creatures and an appealing design, simple and easy to read content and clear reasons to take action all matter. Once you’ve done the job to land someone on your site you need to appeal to the human to make the decision to call, email or otherwise get in touch.
The Results
With the launch of the new LocksOn website and an aligned Google Ads campaign, Ad impressions increased by 1000%, clicks from Google Ads increased by 200% and the cost per click was reduced by one-third. More importantly, the crucial Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) doubled. The added bonus was that organic google ranking shot up too. That’s because aligning for paid search behaviour will help traffic from non-paid sources improve also.
Not every website needs to be so closely aligned to their Google Ads campaign, but for a local service provider like LocksOn, this alignment is vital for survival. It’s important to remember that a website or Google Ads campaign is never a set and forget exercise. New optimisation opportunities present themselves every week. Simply by following what customers are looking for and responding accordingly you will stay on top of things, including the all-important search results.
