PPC (Pay Per Click) AdWords

When you search for a phrase, these are the results at the very top. Typically, whatever keyword phrase you searched, and similarly worded phrases will appear. There is usually more than one business targeting this keyword or keyword phrase which initiates an auction. There are several things that determine who wins the auction and what ad ranks at the top.  The first determining factor is the maximum bid that is set in the system for that keyword phrase. The next factor is the quality score of the landing page (where you go when you click on the ad). The final factor is the quality score of the ad itself.

Adwords campaigns, often called pay per click (PPC) campaigns, are more straightforward when it comes to design and implementation of keywords and keyword phrases. As discussed in the SEO portion of our site, when building a website, you want to use natural language to make the site look more authoritative. People are looking for plain language. This reassures them that what they’ve typed in on Google or one of the other major SERPS returned a search result that is pertinent. With Adwords/PPC campaigns, keywords and keyword phrases are stuffed to match the relevant search phrase someone is searching for. There need to be as many relevant keywords related to the search you want your ad to come up for, stuffed into the ad as possible. This improves your quality score and therefore saves you money on the PPC. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re a fence company in Oklahoma and you want to come up for fence companies in Oklahoma. You would want your ad to contain “fence companies in Oklahoma” or a close derivative of that keyword phrase as much as possible.

You can set a monthly budget on this. We will optimize the campaign for you to save as much money as possible. An Adwords account, particularly with Google, is a very important step to implement into your marketing strategy in the beginning. Not only will it make your phone ring, but it will also drive traffic to your website (Google loves this and they get money, so they really love it). This will make it rank higher and as that happens your clicks will get cheaper. Eventually, as traffic to your website improves, you can pause Adwords and survive off of organic traffic alone.   

How to Optimize Your AdWords Campaign

Optimization of an AdWords campaign first starts with making a competitive bid. If you want to rank at the top, you have to pay whatever the going rate is for the particular keyword phrase you’re wanting to rank for.  If there is no competition this can be merely a few cents, but more than likely it will be something competitive. This can be much more expensive based solely on how far competing businesses are willing to drive up the price.

There are ways to make your bid cheaper than your competition’s. Having a landing page for your particular keyword phrase that ranks higher on the SERPS than your competition is a great start. This is achieved through SEO work on the landing page and is set up differently from the ad itself.

The last piece to achieve a higher quality score and keep the cost down as much as possible is relevance. Having a relevant ad group and ad for the keyword phrase you’re targeting is crucial. Inside the AdWords campaign, we can break down and target things such as industry areas or geographic areas.  Breaking down results and fine tuning exactly what keyword phrase you want to rank for is important because it helps make a more relevant ad.  If you have a campaign that is targeting a large metro area, you would want to break down the particular suburbs into different ad groups. Narrowing down the search phrase to match the search ad and the landing page raises your quality score. This makes the ad not only more relevant but more cost effective.