Welcome, 2015. It’s a fresh new start for our funeral Pay-Per-Click efforts. And to help you boost your search engine marketing this year, here are three things you can do.

1. Be aware of the various sources of traffic to your site

Right from the start of your funeral PPC campaign, you already knew which keywords you should dominate. But have you been keeping track of what other keywords and sources are giving your funeral home website meaningful traffic?

By looking at your entire PPC account, you will get a better perspective of where site visits come from.

One of the things you need to take a look at is traffic coming from keyword match type. By determining the match type of the keywords, whether broad or phrase match, you can have a better view of what you need to work on. See if there are keywords that you haven’t included in your set of keywords yet and determine if they are providing you with meaningful traffic, i.e. site visits that convert to sales. It’s also a way for you to see if there are negative keywords that could be hurting your campaign by increasing your costs per click.

Another thing you should be concerned about is the Search Query Reports. You should monitor it at least once per week to see if you need to take advantage of separate ad groups per match types. Doing this will give you complete control over you campaign.

2. Leverage relevant ad texts that match search keywords

Using a properly structured PPC ad that uses exact match keywords provides searchers with a more relevant and valuable ad. Client families usually need funeral services fast, so a funeral ad should immediately address their concern. What this type of ad does is it provides better user experience which increases the likelihood of a click, boosts Quality Score, and lead to lower Cost Per Click. All these could give the ad more impressions and higher average ranking.

3. Test your text ads, and then test them some more

Did you have a testing strategy in the past? Were you able to pinpoint exactly what worked and what didn’t? If you didn’t, make a point of including testing in your strategy. Testing may make or break your funeral marketing efforts this year.

One of the simplest ways to test whether your text ad is working or not is to create three ads per group. The ads should be similar to each other, except for the call-to-action, for example. If you have gathered enough data from these ads, you can then replace the weakest performing text ad with a new variation. You can then move to test variations for your text ad’s headlines and body. Do this constantly for maximum results.

There are lots of other things you can do to improve your funeral marketing campaigns this year that we will be happy to share with you in our coming posts, but these three things should jump start your PPC campaign.

For more information on our funeral search marketing campaign and Pay-Per-Click, click on this link or call (800) 810-3595 today.