If you have a business and a website, it’s highly likely that you’d like to be “at the top” of Google. This, of course, is so you can be found by all your potential customers when they’re ready to whip out their wallet to do business with you. As I’ve written before, there is no “top” or “page 1” of Google because of a slew of factors. Search engine optimization or SEO has gone through some very dramatic changes in the last couple years, and no one can claim that they show up at the top for x keyword. Anyone who does, or anyone who tells you that they can guarantee top placement, is lying.

However, there is one thing you can do. Paid placement on the search engines, or “pay per click” advertising (also known as PPC), can get you to the top of the search engines for your target search terms. It can get your business listed when your customers are searching for you, and get you above the other search results very easily, even for highly competitive terms.

How Does PPC Work?

Pay Per Click Search Result Example

Pay Per Click Search Result Example
(click for larger version)

In the simplest of terms, it’s a bidding system. You have a set of search terms that you want to show up for, an example might be “dog training videos”. So if someone types dog training videos into the search bar on Google, your ad comes up. You tell Google (or the other search engines) how much you’re willing to pay if someone clicks your ad.

Let’s say you’re willing to pay $2 to get someone to click on your ad. If no one else is willing to pay that much, you’ll be at the top of the list: guaranteed placement at the top of the search engines. However if someone is bidding higher than your $2, they’ll be above you. You might still be near the top, or you may be farther down on the right.

It doesn’t cost anything for your ad to be displayed (called an “impression”). It only costs you if someone clicks on your link in your ad.

It’s a bit more complicated than this, which I’ll go into in subsequent articles, but that’s the basic idea.

Advantages and Disadvantages of PPC

When comparing PPC to search engine optimization, or “organic” results, there are good things and bad things about it. The biggest advantage is that you can get your business listed right away for very competitive terms, and you have a greater level of control over where you show up. If you want to show up more or higher, you just turn up the dollars you’re willing to spend (increase the bids or increase your budget). If you’ve got a special promotion coming up, just turn up the dollars.

Search engine optimization takes a LOT of work and you may never get up to where you’re showing up near the top of the search engines, because of the competition.

The biggest disadvantage to PPC is that it costs money. Google also makes it very easy to waste your money (remember this is the primary way Google makes its billions!), because they don’t tell you everything you need to know. Furthermore, of all the clicks on the search results page, the ads section only gets clicked about 10% of the time, and the organic results get clicked 90% of the time. But it’s still a very solid tactic to use when you want to get listed.

What To Consider When Using PPC

It’s easy to set up a PPC campaign, but the problem is that it’s easy to waste money. After all, you’re spending money on these ads, and Google doesn’t make it obvious some of the main points you need to make about setting it up. This wastes your money (and makes more for Google). Over the next several weeks, we’re going to discuss the topics you need to know to put an effective PPC campaign in place. As we complete the articles, we’ll link each of the bullets below to the actual article.

  • Landing (Destination) Page – The biggest mistake people make is sending ad clicks to their website’s home page. This ends up costing you money both at the ad level as well as lost opportunities. We’ll show you how to fix this and exactly what to do. Also, remember that “selling stuff” isn’t necessarily the only way to use PPC. It can be used as a solid lead generation tool as well to get buyers into your funnel.
  • Ad Copy – The text ad only has a limited amount of space, so you have to be careful about how you build your ads – not just stick something to the wall and hope it works. How should you word the ads? How can you test them so you know you’re getting the most for your money?
  • Keyword Research – This is where the rubber meets the road. What do you want your ads to show up for? We’ll look at branding versus conversion terms, and tie them back to your goals.
  • Negative Keywords – You probably know what keywords are, but what are negative keywords? This is biggest mistake #2 that people make by not including negative keywords. We’ll help you identify them, and show you why it’s critical  (again costing you more money and making more for Google!).
  • Types of Phrase Matching – There are three different types of phrases that you need to consider. This is biggest mistake #3 when advertisers don’t include the different types of phrase matches (throwing more money at Google here).
  • Dynamic Keyword Insertion – Finally, this is a cool technique that can get your ads noticed (and clicked) more than your competition. But it can backfire on you in one situation, so you have to evaluate when to use it.

So stay tuned as we flesh this out and give you the steps you need to make it work properly.

What other topics have you struggled with in your PPC campaigns? Tell me below.