Search engine marketing is an important way of bringing new customers to your website. Google handles more than 3.5 billion search queries every single day; that’s a huge customer pool you should be focusing on tapping. Search engine optimization is, of course, a part of that process. But you can speed the process up — and in some cases make up for lackluster organic rankings — by utilizing pay per click advertising on Google and its major competitors.
The Mechanics of Paid Search Advertising
In case you’re not already familiar with it, here’s a rundown of how pay per click works: You, as a business, choose certain keywords related to your business and bid to have your ads displayed when users type those keywords as part of their search queries. But you don’t pay every time your ad is displayed. Instead, you pay only when a user actually clicks on your ad. The most important aspect of the process, therefore, is doing your PPC keyword research so that you’re not only getting plenty of pay per click traffic, but getting qualified traffic that brings in more revenue than you’re spending on those particular keywords.
Businesses That Can Benefit From PPC
Now that you know how PPC works, you can probably guess what kinds of businesses can do the best on it. Because search engines work by users typing in keywords, paid search advertising doesn’t work very well unless there’s already a demand for the product or service you’re offering. You might be able to get a few people to click on an ad for an entirely new product if you bid on keywords related to a specific problem that they’re having (if you’ve invented a new kind of plunger and bid on “unclogging a toilet,” for example), but in general search engines aren’t the platform to market novel ideas. The businesses that tend to do well with search engine advertising are those that would have been listed in the phone book a decade ago, not the businesses that would need late-night infomercials.
Finding Affordable PPC Management
The most important part of getting started with PPC advertising is finding an effective yet affordable PPC management agency to handle your campaign(s). This isn’t work that you want to do in house. The process of choosing keywords and then monitoring them to ensure that they’re performing to expectations is a technical and time-intensive one — and mistakes can quickly cost you thousands upon thousands of dollars. Look for a PPC agency with years of experience and plenty of good references. PPC can help your business enormously, but only if it’s done right.
Do you have any tips to share on selecting an affordable PPC management service? Join the discussion in the comments.