An Often-Overlooked Weapon… Google Adwords

One of the fastest ways to test your website is to pay to have your ad appear on the search engines.  On Google, you can bid on the search terms that your customers would be using to find your site and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and visits your site.  This is called Pay per Click (PPC) advertising.

Sounds great, right?  Well, yes and no.

Because most search engines offer this as an auction the price of your clicks can be very high. Many of your competitors may be bidding far too much and driving the price of clicks up in your industry.

The second downside of PPC advertising is that (like they always do) Google has made this much more complicated than it needs to be. Google dictates what ads can run and what you’ll pay based on a plethora of factors – very few of which they make publicly known.

In fact, the process is so complicated that they offer certifications on Adwords Specialists and anyone looking at hiring a full-time PPC Manager would be looking at paying a salary of anywhere from $60,000 per year and up.

But I digress. Yes, PPC is complicated but it can also be wildly effective. Remember, you’re only paying when someone clicks on your ad and your price is determined but a number of factors that we can control.  Most of your competitors would not know what these factors are so it is very possible for your ads to appear higher than theirs but you would still be paying a significantly lower price per click.

In a perfect world, if we look at the first page of Google.  You would want to see your Google Places page to be in the A spot on the map, your own site to be at the top of the natural search listings, your Adwords Ad to be somewhere near the top (depending on costs) and one or two of your videos also appearing on the first page.

Of course, this isn’t always possible but if dominating the search engines is your goal than this would be the utlimate success.