Target community niches through search engine pay-per-click

Now that your website can close the sale, the challenge is to increase the flow of qualified prospects. The first step is to use metatags and other techniques to makes sure the search engines find you when users type in specific criteria such as the “banks in Peoria.” See our report entitled Searching for Prospects (OBR 69) for a complete overview of search engine optimization techniques.

But as the Web gets more crowded, you need to do more than that to attract new loan- and bank-account prospects. With more than 300 million searches conducted each day worldwide (Table 1 below), the best place to find new customers online is still the search engine results page.

Table 1

Worldwide Daily Searches on Major Search Engines

millions

Source: Online Banking Report estimates +/- 20% based on the following info:
(1) WordTracker.com estimate of 320 million total daily searches in April multiplied by column 3;
(2) StatMarket HitBox tally of search engine referrals at sites they track, 4/03; (3) Nielson NetRatings estimate of U.S. home and work unique visitors, 1/03; (4) includes Teoma.com; (5) included with parent

It used to be that it was cost prohibitive for all but the biggest banks to
run banners on search engines. Today, with the advent of small pay-per-click (PPC) display ads (ð pp. 8-10), the economics of search-engine advertising are much different. It no longer requires a six-figure advertising budget. Self-service account management has done away with minimums and can be very cost effective, so long as you target the right keywords
(ð Table 4, p. 4). Bottom line: a community bank or credit union can target searchers in its own market for just a few hundred dollars per month.