If you’re wanting to bring more attention to your business online, then one avenue you’ll want to look into is paid search advertising, or having links to your company’s website placed in the paid results section of search engine results pages. This kind of advertising — called pay per click or PPC because you only pay the search engine when your ad is clicked on, no matter how many times it’s viewed — is highly effective. It can, however, be a little difficult to understand. To get you started, here are five top PPC FAQs, answered:
- How Are PPC and SEO Strategies Different?
People often get confused when looking at PPC and SEO because they’re both part of search engine marketing. PPC, as discussed above, involves actually placing ads on search engine results pages. SEO, on the other hand, stands for search engine optimization and deals with making your website rank more highly in the organic (unpaid) results. The two strategies are often used in tandem, but they’re accomplished completely differently.
- How Do You Implement Paid Search Ads?
How does pay per click advertising work in practice? Each search engine uses a platform to manage their ads. You use that platform to bid on certain keywords that are relevant to your business. The trick, therefore, is bidding on the right terms so your ad will be placed strategically without overpaying.
- What Businesses Can Benefit From PPC?
Almost all businesses should be using SEM of some kind, but PPC can benefit some types of businesses in particular. Those include businesses with high lifetime customer values (doctors, cable providers, online educational institutions), ones with high margins (lawyers, repairmen, car dealerships), ones that sell hard-to-find products (specialty items, imported items, niche interests), and ones with a highly season business model (florists, decorators, holiday supply stores).
- Why Aren’t My Paid Search Ads Working?
If you’re not getting the results you want from PPC advertising, then you should look at two things first: how many clicks you’re getting, and how many of those clicks turn into solid leads. If your clicks are low, then you probably aren’t placing your ads correctly. If the latter number seems to be the problem, though, then you’re dealing with something called conversion. It’s too complicated to cover all possible conversion problems in this article, but you should start by ensuring that your ad copy and landing pages are in good shape and relevant to the keywords you’ve chosen.
- Do I Need PPC Advertising Management?
This is a big question most businesses end up asking at some point: Is it necessary to hire a PPC advertising management company, or not? The bottom line — and it’s been proven time and time again — is that you’re likely to see a much higher return on your investment if you pay for PPC campaign management services. The process of choosing keywords, bidding on them carefully and constantly analyzing their performance is both time-consuming and technical. Pay per click costs some businesses unnecessarily because they aren’t willing to hire experts to manage their campaigns.
Got anything to add regarding PPC advertising management, or PPC in general? Join the discussion in the comments.
