Skeeter Beater: Paid Search & Email

Approach

• We recommended dropping the billboard. It was the biggest line in the budget and the hardest to argue with, because a billboard looks like advertising in a way a search campaign never does. What it could not do was name a single customer it had brought in. Moving that money into search meant trading something visible for something countable.
• Spend the freed-up budget on old customers before new ones. The obvious move when the ad bill drops is to chase more first-time bookings with what is left. The first campaigns went the other way, to people who had already paid Skeeter Beater once and had simply never been asked again, timed to the start of the treatment season.
• Write pages for the towns Skeeter Beater treats, and no others. The tempting version of local SEO is a page for every suburb within driving distance. Pages were built only for the communities the business serves, because a page that wins a search the company then has to turn down is worse than no page at all.