I personally have not tried overture or google ads yet. But since Catalyst asked us to share things that we have tried I thought I would share this with you. I have recently decided to grow my local business. I started by going to overtures web site and using their keyword suggestion tool. I put in web design, then drilled down from there to get to Knoxville web design. (Which Knoxville is my local market) There are not a lot of searches for this search term, but it is pretty consistent month to month, so I decided to start there.
I then went to
www.instantposition.com and used their
SEO-Doctor tool (which is free for now) and did a test on my index page for Knoxville web design. I then took about 2 hours and optimized my index page to end up with a 27 out of 30 score for the “Knoxville web design” term and a 30 out of 30 for the term “web design”.
Once I got these scores, I resubmitted my site to some of the free search engine listings. I was already in Yahoo and Google (only found under my site name) so I left them alone.
After last weeks updates my rankings are now as follows for the search term “Knoxville web design” (with an average result listing of over 200,000):
AOL Search - #6
MSN - #10
Yahoo - #7
Google - #6 and #17
Alta Vista - #7
All the Web - #11
Now this is for a site that was not found under any search terms at all except for actually typing in the site name “Glacial Point” as the search term since the late 90’s. (I was not much into page rank back then…)
I am starting to believe that if you have a very specific target market, you can get good rankings without spending a lot of money (or any at all, in my case). Now if I was going for the most generic search term “web design”, then I would say that Google Adwords and Overture are your best bet, for high placement.
I hope this info helps somebody, as it did me.
Best of luck to all.