The Big Boys Are Messing It Up, How Do you compete with the Fortune 500s is the name of a thread at HighRankings. The story the thread creator tells, is one that you hear more and more often these days. The large companies are discovering the PPC arena and they are spending enormous amounts of money. So where a click used to cost 15 cents, now costs $2 per click. Do these big budget companies look at ROI? Do they care? Is it part of their plan to weed out the small mom and pops? I am not sure, anyone work for these big spenders want to shed some light?

So how do the smaller budgets, that look at ROI, compete with those big budget shops? The thread at HighRankings offers some advice:

- Put more efforts towards natural search
- Bid on more specific, less competitive keywords
- Do you have a unique selling proposition?
- "Sell via the trust and credibility you gain from the detailed reviews, uses and testimonials of your product."
- Advertise offline on local TV spots
- Cross sell or offer incentives to increase the average order size.
- Improve conversion rates
- Look at the customer lifetime value and not a single order
- Go with some of the smaller PPC engines

And to end this entry with a quote from Andrew Goodman; "Is SEO / SEM supposed to be some kind of free lunch? I thought we were past those days."

Great thread.

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