Would Paid Advertising on Search Engines Benefit My Business?

I can’t think why advertising wouldn’t be advantageous; however, it would ultimately depend on your product or service as well as your target market. But the basics are that, if you want traffic to your website, then yes, it could be beneficial regardless of what you sell.  Make sense thus far? Good!  So now, what type of advertising would work? Again, if you want traffic to your website, pay per click, also known as PPC advertising, Google or Yahoo!/Bing would be ideal.

The skinny on PPC

For those who are less familiar where the actual paid ads show up, here is the skinny.  When you do a search on one of the search engines, Google for example, you will see a results page that Google thinks would best match your search query.  The paid ads, also marked as sponsored ads, will show up as the top three results with a little ‘Ad’ icon, along the right hand side of the search results and sometimes in the middle or bottom of the organic results. Remember, that organic results are ‘free’ listings and you don’t have to pay to be there but you need to optimize your website in order to earn your spot there.  You need to have the right keywords, get links to your page, internal links on your page and etc to help you get higher up in the organic rankings. Check out our search engine optimization section for more on SEO and organic rankings.

Your advertising goals

Now you know where the ads show up and that it will most likely benefit your website as far as driving traffic to it, now what? You will need to determine the goal of the advertising.  The goal may be to help gain brand awareness, to help sell a specific product, get people to know about a certain product or offer a service. Once you determine the goal of the advertising, you may begin crafting the ad campaign.

Creation of your campaign

You will need to do a little research to determine the type of keywords consumers’ imagine when thinking of your product or service.  Then, you would create a keyword list, create the ads and set up the financial and geographical parts of the ad campaign. The point is to create a keyword list that is relevant to the products or service you are selling and craft the ad to that keyword list.  This is important because when someone clicks on the ad, you will be charged and the idea isn’t to get consumers to click on an ad that is selling cake pops, if you only sell brownies. (yummy) Another point to make here is to utilize negative keywords, so if someone enters a phrase that you absolutely don’t want your ad to show up for, you won’t.  A great example is if you sell trucks, but you don’t want to have your ad show up and be clicked on for toy trucks, so you could make toy a negative keyword.

Again with the why

Now that you understand how the advertising campaign is set up and where it shows up, let’s touch back on the why. You want to have a paid advertising campaign on search engines so when consumers are looking for a specific product and you are selling it, or offering it, you will show up higher in the rankings, usually within the top two pages in the search results.  Could YOU benefit from more traffic to your website? That’s a silly question!

Keep in mind

Reminder, when consumers are searching on the internet, they are actively looking for that product to research or buy. You want to be there every time they do.  So the question remains, when consumers are looking for your product, do YOU want to be one of the options they have? If are you aren’t there, know, someone else will be, do you want to lose that sale?

Should you have any questions about PPC or would like to set up a campaign and still aren’t sure, please reach out and contact me and I would be happy to help. Otherwise, good luck on your campaign and happy clicking! Also note, it isn’t a set it and done type thing and needs to be continuously managed. I’d love to help manage your campaigns.

~Kristen

Kristen Day

CEO/Founder of A Visual Business

Kristen is a small business owner and thus dedicated to other small business owners by helping them improve their online presence with search engine optimization, social media marketing, email marketing and pay per click advertising all of which are necessary 'evils' in the digital marketing sphere but enables small business owners the opportunity to compete with larger companies. When not in the digital arena, you can find her riding her Honda VTX1300 or drinking a margarita.