Lately small businesses have been bombarded with strategies and tricks to improve SEO efforts.
As an employee hired solely for SEO reasons, I understand the importance of organic search rankings and the excitement that comes from seeing your company pop up after a Google search.
However, companies need to remember that pay per click (PPC) advertising is still an important part of the marketing process.
Even if your businesses in ranking well in organic search, PPC marketing should still be on the top of the priority list. Unfortunately, many companies toss PPC marketing to this side once SEO efforts yield positive results.
For those who are unfamiliar, PPC marketing allows a company to place little ads either on the top or on the side of search engine results pages (SERP), and each time that ad is clicked the company has to pay a certain amount of money. This is a quick way for a business to get their ads at the top of major search engines, and is therefore primarily used by startup companies and companies who haven’t see their website rank well in organic search.
Consider a few of the benefits of PPC advertising:
• Keyword and Phrase Tracking—PPC advertising allows a company to learn quickly which keywords and/or phrases and ads yield the most profitable results. This takes much longer to track if you’re using SEO alone. Knowing this information will then, in turn, also help your future SEO efforts.
• Reliable—SEO rankings can fluctuate at any time, but a company can count on PPC marketing. If you pay for an ad to be at the top of a Google search page, it will be there. It also serves as a nice back-up in case your organic search ranking does fall short of your expectations.
• Competition—It can be very difficult to compete with dominant brands. However, PPC helps to keep things fair. If you can pay for that top spot on Google, you’ve got it. This will put your company’s ad right in the middle of all those dominant brands, which helps to even out the competition.
• Budget—Many companies think that PPC will force them to take out a small business loan, but companies can actually set their own budget. You can be as aggressive or as passive as you’d like to be, which puts you, the company owner, in total control.
PPC can offer these benefits to both small and large companies. Regardless of where your company falls on the SEO scale, PPC will always be important. Whether your company has taken a break from this type of advertising or has never given it a thought, it’s time to put it on the radar. Below lists 5 steps to getting started with PPC:
4 Simple Steps to Get Your Company Going with PPC
1. Search Engine—Just about every major search engine (and many local search engines) allows PPC advertising. The first step is deciding where you want to place your ads. Different search engines have different benefits, so don’t go running to Google without doing a little bit of research! Consider your budget and your company goals.
2. Keywords—It is important to consider which keywords you want to target. PPC ads are connected to specific keywords, so in other words, the ad will only be seen by consumers when the keyword/keywords are typed into the search box. Once you decide keywords that work for you, be sure to add them into the text and title.
3. Bidding—This is where PPC advertising gets a bit confusing. Your company has to pay the search engine every time someone clicks on an ad you placed on their search engine. The highest bidder then gets the best spot on that particular search page (usually at the top as opposed to on the side). This is the easy part. It is deciding how much money you should bid that gets a bit tricky. Consider this example:
– Let’s say you get one sale for every 100 clicks (a conversion rate of 1:100) and your product costs $10. This then means that you should not pay more than 10 cents per click if you want to break even. If the highest bid costs 30 cents, then it is not worth the money for your company.
4. Landing Page—You want to make sure that when someone clicks on your ad they are sent to a page that will allow them to buy the product. Make sure the page is organized and easy to use so that you don’t pay for a bunch of clicks that don’t give you a sale.
Amanda DiSilvestro is an expert writer on toll free numbers based in San Diego, California. She writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as workers compensation insurance. You can find more of her articles as well as vendors comparisons for your small business needs at Business.com.
January 3rd, 2012 at 4:38 pm
Interesting SEO tips Amanda. Point 4 on the list is particularly important. Because customers expect to land on a webpage that’s specific to their needs as per advert. Otherwise, an advertiser can quickly lose trust of potential customers. And that of course means the PPC campaign could easily be money thrown down the drain!
January 4th, 2012 at 11:25 am
Great article on the basics. I also think it is important to use negative keywords to help find your target market and weed out erroneous traffic.