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Challenge: Acquire geo-targeted leads.
Solution: Paid search.
Results: Information on new leads continued to increase, with a 104 percent lift in month four over the initial month of the campaign.
Christopher Noon has a sunny disposition now that his lawn care company is raking in the leads. The secret ingredient fertilizing the growth is paid search, says the president and co-founder of Hudson, Mass.-based Noon Turf Care, which provides chemical lawn care services to residential clients in Massachusetts.
In February 2010, Noon hired Middletown, Del.-based search marketing firm eZanga to weed out the keywords that weren't working in his search marketing efforts and to begin harvesting more green.
"My territory is very small," Noon says. "My target market is about 500,000 residents in Massachusetts. So that's who I'm trying to hit. No one else. And [they're] only folks who want chemical care for their lawn and shrubs, tree care, and pest control."
To target that audience living within 200 specific ZIP codes, the first order of business was to pull out keywords like "lawnmower repair" and "lawnmowing company" that were draining his budget and were not bringing in the local leads Noon Turf Care requires. Noon says previous search engine optimization efforts had littered his site with these kinds of keywords to the point that even the most tenacious chemical lawn care prospects were losing patience while trying to dig deep into his site and hit the pay dirt of relevant information.
"They were getting so lost," Noon says.
So Noon optimized for keywords such as "weed control MA" and "lawncare service MA" and made the site simpler for new leads to find what they needed in order to convert. For example, Noon enlarged the "Get a Quote" button until it took up nearly a third of the homepage.
Still, when the campaign went live on Mar. 1, Noon was so anxious to see results that he immediately began performing tests to see if the ads were appearing with the selected keywords. He tested so frequently that his vendor warned him that he was starting to interrupt the proper rotation of his advertisements. After Noon calmed down and allowed the campaign to take root, it began to yield results.
By April, a peak month for Noon Turf Care, he was seeing healthy new business sprout directly from the campaign. That month, Noon invested $1,000 in pay-per-click advertising. His sales agents received 44 calls, two emails and results from 22 "Web events," which relate to online forms prospects fill out—usually through the site's "Get a Quote" button. Noon says his company followed up on those leads and turned them into customers.
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