Have you ever noticed the word Ad next to search results at the top of Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other pages? These sponsored search results are called Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing. If you run your own business and want to increase traffic to your website, PPC marketing is a powerful tool you can’t afford to ignore.
But, before you begin a PPC campaign, it is important to understand the basics. Since PPC primarily helps generate traffic, your site needs to be ready to handle that traffic, no matter where it comes from. Is your site optimized with responsive design so it looks its best on any device (phone, tablet, laptop)? If your site doesn’t look professional on any size screen, you’ll probably lose business. Other valuable data to understand is the conversion rate of your website. That is, the percentage of your traffic that converts to qualified leads. This baseline statistic helps you understand how efficiently your website performs, and is essential to charting your growth as you embark on a PPC campaign.
A Pay-Per-Click campaign is a proven way to bring relevant traffic to your website. That means your website’s ad will be shown to Internet users who are actively seeking the service you provide. How does it work? We’ll Google as an example, since their PPC system is the most popular. You pay Google to place an ad for your cleaning and restoration business within their search results. This means your ad will appear when someone types in specific keywords related to your business, such as flooded basement, fire damage cleanup, frozen burst pipe. Then, whenever someone clicks on your ad, you pay Google.
The first step to setting up your Pay-Per-Click campaign is to set up your Google AdWords. You choose which keywords and key phrases will be best for your PPC campaign. The best key words are those that a person interested in using your service will enter into an online search. Or, you could use key words and phrases based on the services you wish to promote most. A good keyword list will ensure you get the most qualified, interested traffic.
With Google AdWords campaign, you set a daily advertising budget for your business. Your budget is used to place bids on your chosen keywords. The bids represent the maximum amount you’re willing to pay per click. The most common keywords get higher bids (that is, they cost more) because more businesses are competing for the same markets. For example: If your keyword (or, in this case, key phrase) is fire damage restoration, when a user enters that search term, Google draws from a pool of relevant ads and chooses which ones to display, based on bids and ad quality. Google then ranks the ads and displays them to the searcher. If the searcher clicks on your ad (and thus visits your site), you pay Google the amount you bid. This is repeated for every search and, over time, Google’s analytic tools help you understand how effective your campaign is, so you can continually improve it. You can also use the PPC system to increase your traffic through Bing and Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, and more.
Sound complicated? It is, and it isn’t, once you understand the basics behind how Pay-Per-Click can work to your advantage. Learn how to Kill It Online with Sonny Ahuja (www.SonnyAhuja.com).
And if you are concerned of how to increase your website traffic, you might want to make your website mobile friendly, so feel free to stay here for a while!
