So you want to advertise on search engines to gain more revenue on your website? Find out how: You have a website and you are doing all the search engine optimization (SEO) you can possibly do. You are doing everything correctly and your pages are slowly rising on the search engine results page (SERP) towards those all-important top 3 positions, but in the meantime, you want traffic to your website and you want conversions (be them purchases on your website, registers, joins, etc). How do you get more target traffic to your website quickly without the wait for all your SEO to kick-in? The answer is Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC). All search engines have them, they call them different things from Google’s ‘AdWords’ to Bing’s ‘AdCenter’ to Yahoo’s ‘search marketing’. These are called PPC because an advertiser only pays for the ad when it is clicked on and not when placing it or each time there is an impression. I am a big advocate of this type of online advertising and even though it is not traditionally seen as part of SEO, the bottom line is that it is simply another way to gain targeted traffic and get more conversions on your website and hence generate more revenue. I will focus only on Google’s AdWords because it it by far the most widely used serach engine, but the same concepts apply to PPC campaigns on other search engines. PPC, when instigated in the correct way can produce instantaneous traffic to your website. Of course the Pro’s of SEO is that there is no cost each time someone clicks on your webpage result in the SERP and that it stays there for a very long time(when done correctly), whereas each time someone clicks on your PPC result in the SERP you are charged a certain amount. This charge depends on the bid you put in for a certain keyword, the bid others put in for that keywords and your quality score. Costs per click can be anywhere between $0.02 USD to hundreds of dollars, but most keywords cost around $1-$2 per click. The amount you are charged and where your result comes up in the PPC section of the SERP is what I will explain below and give you hints to gain better results for cheaper. Firstly you will notice from the following points below, there are many similar factors to a successful PPC campaign as is with a successful SEO campaign. This is great because your efforts and time investment to optimize your website for a PPC campaign will harmonize with your efforts to get better results organically in your SEO campaign. Always start with comprehensive keyword research – including looking at what keywords your competitors are using. Ensure you use the many free Google keyword tools to research as many synonyms and keyword phrases to base your PPC campaign on. I strongly suggest these 2 tools for keyword research: Google AdWords (for search volume numbers and competition statistics per keyword) and Google Insights (for comparing up to 5 keywords to each other) Ensure the page is optimized for those keywords including meta tags. Make clear Campaigns and ‘Ad Groups’. This means that if you sell housing furniture online you should have a campaign for lounge furniture, a separate campaign for bedroom furniture etc. Then under the campaign for bedroom furniture ensure you have well defined ‘Ad Groups’ such as Bunk Beds, Double Beds, Single Beds etc. That way each ‘Ad Groups’ can have specific keywords and text around exactly what the potential client will be searching for. Set goals for conversion – Google AdWords like to see you tracking goals and using split testing on different ‘Ad Groups’ so as to constantly improve your ads and hence your results. In the end the better and more strongly related your ad is to the searchers query, the better chance the searcher will click on your ad and also the better chance they will complete your goal and become a ‘conversion’ on your website. This means that Google wins (because they received money from you for the click through) and you win (because the searcher arrives to your website and hopefully completes exactly what you wanted them to do on your site because they were the right person). This is all about relevancy. So how do you show up first in PPC? Why cant people simply make bad ads, pay for them and bid the highest amount for a click and hence show up first on Google in the sponsored links section? That is because Google AdWords uses a complex paid search algorithm that takes into account “Quality Score”. What is Quality Score? Quality Score (QS) takes into account a myriad of factors including: The quality of your landing page (SEO optimization) How relevant your keywords are to the search term How relevant your keywords in your ads are to your page Historical click through rates (CTR) – which means the longer your campaigns are running and the better you improve them, then the better they will rate – snowball effect Geographic region Other factors (one good tip is to have a ‘privacy page’ – Google love sit and gives you a better QS Google actually show you your QS when signed into AdWords: from within the campaign, click customize columns, select show quality score. How do I improve my QS: Improve your CTR constantly Use split testing to improve your ‘Ad Groups’ Change onpage factors like body text, meta tags, add privacy policy Create goals and tweak campaigns so that your goal conversion rate is higher each week. You want more info? Google have great training videos for anyone to learn how to become an expert in creating and maintaining successful PPC campaigns. Also make sure you abide by all the Google landing page guidelines.
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