For many small businesses, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Linkedin Ads are useful for getting targeted traffic to visit their websites. Although we always advocate Search Engine optimisation (SEO) as a long term strategy, PPC is a very useful way of testing new websites after launch as well as testing new and updated pages to ensure that they are converting well.
The large number of targeted traffic that PPC advertising can send to a website enable regular testing to be done on a website as and when required. This is where PPC trumps SEO as it can be used for testing as well as used to gain additional traffic for seasonal promotions and sales.
PPC Campaign Management
Although Google, Facebook and Linkedin have tried to make the process as simple as possible as you maybe expect so that more small business owners choose to use them. It can often become apparent to many quite quickly that the quality of the traffic may not be what they expected but before they are able to alter or change anything, their budget could be exhausted.
That isn’t to say with some well thought out research, using books, websites/blogs and forums. Enough advice and information cannot be gleaned about what needs to be done. But not every small business owner or their staff have time to learn all of this, which is why businesses choose to take up the services of a PPC specialist such as Small World SEO.
Keyword Research
Getting the right keywords together is probably one of the most important aspects of any Google Ads campaign. Not just because the right keywords are required to get visitors to the website, but because the wrong keywords can end up using up most of the budget on wasted clicks on visitors who will have clicked or you advert, visited the website only to realise that your website isn’t what they were looking for.
As so, negative keywords are quite possibly just as important because they can be used to make sure that ambiguous keywords with many meanings will not be shown to people who are not interested in your products or services. This in turn will save you money and increase the likelihood of your budget stretching further to bring in more traffic.
Cost Per Click (CPC) Optimisation
Unlike with SEO which aims to get keywords ranking as high as possible. A Google Ads campaign that aims to have all keywords in the top 3 positions will be very expensive compared to one that freely allows some of the more important keywords to be higher and some in the lower positions on page one.
Getting this right has the twofold benefit of bringing in a greater number of visitors for a much lower cost. But this isn’t all that is involved as the conversion rate of the keywords much also be taken into account. Quite often, there maybe a great deal of clicks but the traffic generated will sometimes result in nothing more than a high bounce rate as the visitors will simply leave the website seconds after arriving on the website.
Landing Page Optimisation
For many small business owners using PPC, they maybe do not have the time or budget to create new landing pages simply for the PPC campaigns. Quite often, there maybe will not be much use for these as there will be a page on the website which is suitable. However, sometimes a page which is optimised for SEO will not produce the type of results a landing page only optimised for PPC visitor conversions.
The PPC campaign page will simply be a page which looks very much like an existing page, but optimised for the PPC visitors. The difference with this page will be that no thought will need to be given to search engines and the page can be made to be visually appealing to humans only.
Budget Management
This is possibly the most important aspect of any PPC campaign and must not be deviated away from. First off, you should be sure that the settings are checked to be sure that your entire budget cannot be spent too quickly and only a set amount can be used per day or hour. It can be a costly mistake to make and mean that their is no budget for the rest of the week or month.
In these situations, it can be all too tempting to stretch your budget and add more money to your account to make up for initial mistakes. For small businesses, this can be difficult because cash flow is a big consideration and money lost through poor budget management can mean having to divert money from other areas to keep the PPC campaign going. This is why SEO is a much better strategy long term as budget is not dictated by the advertising network.
Take the pain out of Managing your PPC Campaign
Why not find out Small World SEO can help you by managing your PPC campaigns from initial setup through to monthly campaign management. Unlike other companies that will take a percentage of your budget as their fee for the services, which can typically can be as much as 10% of your Ad spend. We simply charge a small fixed fee which often works out better value than taking a percentage.
If you’d like to find out more, please head over to our contact page and get in touch.