Google Keyword Tool is great to figure out how many people are searching for a keyword. The only problem is, if you offering catering services in the LA area, you can only serve your local market, and it doesn’t matter how many people are searching for “catering services” in New York or Miami.

So, how can you calculate how many people in your local area are searching for your services?

1. Go to Google Traffic Estimator Tool

2. Enter Your Keywords
You can use Google Keyword Tool to get ideas.

3. Enter a Maximum Cost Per Click (CPC) of $50
Don’t worry, you won’t be paying anything; you’re just doing research.

4. Enter a Daily Budget of $50,000
Again, you won’t be paying a dime, so don’t worry about it.

5. Select Your Target Market
You can select cities, states, a bundle of cities or, for example, “Los Angeles and 60 miles around it”.

6. Multiply the Number of Total Clicks by 10
OK, this is not very scientific, but it’s pretty accurate. Google will show you how many clicks you’ll get if you get the #1 spot as a Google AdWords advertiser. Most ads at the top (if they are well written) get a click-through rate of 5%-10%. That means that for every 10-20 times the ad is shown, it gets 1 click. So, if Google tells you you’ll get 100 clicks per day, it’s safe to say that your ad will be shown 1,000-2,000 times. That’s the approximate number of searches the keyword has.

Note: as with any search volume tool, you won’t get an exact number, but if you follow this step-by-step system, you’ll get a pretty accurate estimation.

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Excited to learn Internet Marketing from some of the most successful experts in the industry?

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Why This is the Opportunity You’ve Been Waiting For Your Whole Life:

• If you’re a very good marketer, we’ll make you a great one!
• We’ll teach you to write copy that delivers 20%+ conversion rates.
• We’ll teach you very advanced SEO stuff (you’ll be able to rank any website, in any industry, at the top of Google).
• We’ll teach your Social Media Marketing (you’ll discover proven ways to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and forums to drive huge loads of traffic to any website).
• We’ll teach you how to manage PPC campaigns that get over 10% CTR and how to get qualified visitors for less than $0.25/click in almost every industry.
• We’ll teach you marketing-oriented web design, so you can tweak any website and boost its conversion rate through the roof.
• You’ll be part of a team of 27 talented, motivated and energetic marketers.
• You’ll be helping companies around the world make A LOT of money. Believe us, there’s no feeling like knowing your clients LOVE you (not just “like” you, but really worship you).

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• Send an email to hr@TheOutsourcingCompany.com with the answers to these questions:

1. What needs to be done to rank www.ladolcevitaseattle.com at the top of Google for the keyword “Italian restaurants in Seattle”? (this is not a client of ours, just a random website we found)
2. What do you do as far as PPC campaign optimization? What are the top 3 things that keep PPC campaigns profitable?
3. What would you do to increase the conversion rate of the Italian restaurant’s website mentioned above?
4. In 3 sentences or less, please explain how you would use Social Media Marketing to promote the author of a book on sales training who wants to get more speaking engagements.

If this is not for you but you know someone who might be interested, please Tweet this job opening, link to it or just forward the link to your friends. They’ll thank you for it.

Here’s a check list of odds and ends from the SEO handbook. Often we come across websites that miss a lot of traffic because of a few minor tweaks that wouldn’t take more than a few minutes each. Here’s a quick list of some of our favorite tools and tricks to help you make the most of your site.
1.  Social Media Name Search: Check to see if your company name or your name is taken in several social media sites http://knowem.com/checkusernames.php?u=MeetingWave If it’s available, snatch it up. If someone else is using your name for their social media profile, most social networks have a good system in place to prove that it can be yours.

2. Forum Finder: Use boardreader.com and boardtracker.com to find forums in your industry. You can use industry forums as a resource to post articles, respond to comments, and additional activity. Most forums are no-follow, meaning links you create don’t change SEO rankings, but they can still be a great way to drive traffic.

3. Google Groups: Use Google groups (http://groups.google.com/) to find conversations in your industry. Google groups is a great collection of forums and is better policed than Yahoo forums or craigslist.

4. Create a Quick Video: Here is software to convert powerpoint to video for free: http://www.acoolsoft.com/free-powerpoint-to-youtube-overview.html This allows you to create quick video content and drive additional traffic.

5. Kindle Friendly Blog: Make your blog available to amazon kindle users: https://kindlepublishing.amazon.com/gp/vendor/sign-in/182-2841617-5053156

6. Meetup.com: Find groups of people on meetup.com and post articles to the discussion board. If the admin asks you to stop, please do. Some admins can be picky about what gets posted.

7. Fast Track Your Postings: Post your articles, audio material and videos to http://posterous.com/ really easily. Just email it and forget it! This can save you hundreds of hours of labor and really boosts traffic.

8. Nuke buttons: Take 5 minutes to read this article and make sure you don’t have any conversion killing buttons on your site. http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/conversion-killing-mistakes/

9. Quick Feedback: Here’s a free tool to get feedback from your visitors: http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/uservoice/. Feedback can be invaluable for tweaking and fine tuning a site.

10. Stop chasing perfect: Just launch the product/site/whatever and make it better later. It’s a much easier task to tweak a product and increase traffic over time once the product is in place. Often we get so hung up on making it right that we never make it at all.

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Pay Per Click campaigns can quickly become an expensive endeavor. As more and more advertisers leave TV, Radio, Billboard advertising and move to the web, the competition for each click continues to go up as do the costs. Sometimes each click can cost upwards of $5.00. That’s very expensive traffic unless you’re selling cancer treatments or legal services.

Here are a couple of money saving tips to help drive traffic to your site at bargain basement prices.

Bid on Competitors URLs
You’d be amazed how many people type YouTube.com into a search engine instead of into the address bar. Each time someone types a competitor’s website address into Google, there’s an opportunity for you to show a very inexpensive ad to that consumer. You can make that ad even more compelling by advertising as an alternative to that competitor with their name in the ad copy. Sometimes these very targeted clicks will only cost you $0.05/per click.

Bid on Competitor’s Names
It’s the same idea as the URL, but you’re using the competitor’s name instead. Traffic from clicks like this can be very inexpensive and very targeted if you pick the right competitors.

Bid on Misspelled Words
This is different than Typosquatting. You’re just showing inexpensive ads to people who accidently fat-fingered their keyboard or mistyped the name. An ad like this could cost a fraction of the correctly spelled word. Use this tool http://tools.seobook.com/spelling/keywords-typos.cgi to help find typo’s of important keywords.

Test Your Site with Cheap PPC
Inexpensive tactics like this to drive traffic to your site is a great way to fine tune your product price points, try out new guarantees, experiment with special offers, etc before you even have a product to sell. The goal is to drive a bunch of traffic and see what offers are the most useful. With traffic like this at less than $0.10 per click, you can learn a lot about what works on your site and what needs to be changed. PPC can be expensive in the long run, but you can use tricks like these to experiment for a few dollars.

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Many web sites are created by graphic designers. They often have fantastic imagery, sexy menus, and lots of graphic flair. However, few sites achieve the goal of converting traffic into buyers and making money online.

Recently, we completed a redesign of JohnHersey.com. John is a award winning public speaker and motivational coach, but his website was having trouble conveying his story. We redesigned the site from a marketing perspective and used a few simple ideas to help him convert traffic into customers. I think this is also a great example of how you can use a small site and simple graphic principles to achieve the specific goal of moving prospects towards a next step.

As you can see, John’s new site is pretty simple. It has a small menu of five choices on the top. Remember, choice is a burden online. The fewer choices you customers have to make, the more likely they are to make the right choice. John’s business is to sell his services as a consultant and a public speaker. The most valuable selling point is John’s winning personality. Therefore, the most prominent portion of the website is a large video of John right at eye level with an offer to receive additional videos. The entire site is designed around the goal of getting people to A) watch the brief video and B) trade their email address for additional (free) videos of John demonstrating his skills. These videos are sent to prospects in a drip campaign allowing for additional marketing over time.

You don’t need a really complicated website to achieve those two goals. In fact, we could further simplify the site to be just a video and a special offer. An ultra simple version like that could serve as a landing page for a pay per click campaign, for example. But we want to accomplish a few other tasks with John’s site without overwhelming the audience and detracting from the main goal of the site.

There are a four other goals we want to tackle on the home page. All four are equally important, but we don’t want any of them to detract from the main goal of downloading free videos. We used icons to help people quickly identify what each item represents and easily scanned language to help prospects make a quick decision about clicking through to the page.

1.    John writes a great blog about leadership, courage, sales and other exciting topics. We want to highlight John’s blog on the home page, and allow people to scan quickly and decide if they want to read more.

2.    John has a few well designed products. We want prospects to identify that A) John has products for sale and B) identify if any of John’s products are of interest.

3.    Speaking programs. We want to highlight that John’s business is about public speaking and allow prospects to scan and decide if they want to learn more about his speaking programs.

4.    John also runs a consulting business and would like prospects to understand quickly what his consulting business does and decide to click through to the page if they are interested.

We use the bottom portion of John’s site to highlight some of his major clients for credibility. Credibility is a huge factor in helping prospects decide to take the next step. If clients aren’t already persuaded by John’s videos, blog, and testimonial page, identifying some of his major clients can help tip prospects into taking the next step.

A home page is always a balance between goals and information. The less information you have, the easier it is for your prospects to take the next step, but too little information may prevent them moving forward. Take some time to think more about the goals of your site and how you can use some minor graphic tweaks or a simple redesign to help your prospects convert to customers.

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