SHOULD YOU BE USING PPC?
To put it simply, PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising works by paying to be listed at the top of a search engine and on the right sidebar when somebody searches for a particular phrase. ie If your website is a restaurant in Canterbury, you would want to come up when somebody searches for “restaurant in Canterbury”. This form of advertising is something a lot of marketers or small business owners consider at one point as you can drive relevant traffic straight to your website, or so they think.
This is an example of a PPC advert if you search for Restaurant in Canterbury.
PPC advertising can often bring in a lot of revenue and traffic however it’s not something you can just dip your toe into. Larger corporations get the benefit over the small businesses as they have a much larger budget and unfortunately, this is where money matters.
KEYWORDS
If you are a small business and are local you can be very specific with your keywords. Although not as many people search for them, it is less costly and you are more likely to get conversions due to the quality of the traffic. This is also known as long-tail keywords, which you can read more on those here. Google works out where to put each advert by how much you pay, the more you are prepared to pay the higher you will rank.
TEST TEST TEST!
In order to get the most out of pay per click, you should be prepared to do some testing on different phrases and keywords to see what works for your business. You must also work out how much it costs per conversion to see whether there is a big enough ROI (Return On Investment), if any. When you are testing these phrases, be aware that you won’t always make money as you are seeing what works for you.
MONITORING
You must keep an eye on your PPC adverts as often it can be just using your budget but not generating a return. If that’s happening then you can either test again with different phrases or I recommend trying to get on the first page of Google organically.
OVERVIEW
If you can’t set aside a budget for PPC then it probably isn’t right for you. A few hundred pounds minimum is required at least for the testing phase to see what works, and then you can be spending hundreds each month. For small businesses, this often isn’t viable.
If you do have the budget but not the skill-set required then I would recommend finding a reliable PPC agency who will do all the hard work for you. There are many small business that seed money into PPC when they aren’t quite sure what they’re doing. If you’re not feeling confident then a PPC agency is the right choice for you.
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