SEM for Florists: How to achieve a high bounce rate

Many small businesses are looking to search engine marketing firms (SEMs) to help position them in pay per click campaigns so they'll appear for relevant keywords in popular sites like Google and Yahoo. Local companies, like florists, often prefer to turn to professional firms rather than undergoing the steep learning curve (and ongoing monitoring) while trying to run their businesses.

Based on what I spotted today, I wonder if some these flower shops are making a wise investment.

While checking out a Google SERP, all I could think was 'huh?' Not because of the natural listings, but from seeing florists - some of them long-time friends - appearing in Adwords with our city name beneath their ads.

The funny thing is, none of the 5 flower shops are located in this town. In fact, the nearest one is 17 miles away and one would have a minimum 80 mile round trip to deliver flowers here. That's one heck of a delivery charge.

So I called a couple of the florists and asked if they were expanding their delivery areas. The universal response has 'no'.

'Do you know you are running ads giving your location as down here in Anaheim?'

'No, we don't deliver there. Why would we advertise there?'

Turns out the ads are being placed on their behalf by their own SEM firms.

One shop's campaign is being run by a Yellow Pages company and the florist expressed extreme dismay with the results they'd had so far. 'We get a lot of clicks but few orders.' No kidding. When your home page tells local searchers you're in a town 40 miles from the city where they need to send flowers, they can't hit the back button fast enough.

Another shop owner is trusting his PPC management to a program through a national florist wire service. His Adwords listing is at the bottom of page 2 for a set of fairly non-competitive keywords he doesn't even want and he's paying the SEM around a dollar a click for the privilege. He too expressed great displeasure with the ROI.

Most local florists focus on serving the geographic area within 12-15 miles of their stores. By placing Local ads (and including specific city names) in towns their clients don't directly deliver to, these SEMs have managed to get plenty of bouncing clicks but have failed to serve their customers.

Small business need SEMs and are willing to invest in online marketing - but they need advertising partners that spend their dollars wisely and craft their campaigns to appeal to their target customers.

I pointed my friends to one of my favorite blogs about search marketing for small businesses, Small Business SEM and hope they read up before renewing those campaigns.