Highly Profitable Marketing Strategy for Small Business: 3 of 6

PPC Advertising 

Thats right, PPC, or pay-per-click, advertising is a type of online ad model that allows small businesses to display their ads to people searching online for relevant products and services. 

Pay-per-click works just like it sounds – you pay each time a consumer clicks on your ad content. Though Facebook and other ad platforms use the pay-per-click model, we're focusing on PPC ads that are displayed on Google and other search engines like Bing and Yahoo.

You might be thinking, how exactly do PPC ads work on search engines? 

Here it is, advertisers have to bid on certain keywords that are relevant to their product or service offering. The search engine uses an algorithm to determine which ads show up on the search engine results page (SERP) based on quality, relevance, and validity. 

Much like SEO, the keyword research plays an important role in PPC ad campaigns as you have to bid on keywords that would most likely be used by relevant leads. Google Ads (you may have previously heard it referred to as Google AdWords), is the most popular PPC advertising platform. Since the majority of consumers are using the Google search engine to search for information about products and services, Google is a great place to start with your PPC advertising campaigns. Google uses keyword relevance, landing page quality, and other factors to determine your quality score, which impacts when and where your ads are served on the SERP for related search queries.

The first step to creating PPC ad campaigns is conducting keyword research. This is a time-consuming yet vital process as your entire campaign is built around the keywords that you choose. An effective PPC keyword list should be relevant and exhaustive, including both popular, frequently searched terms and other less competitive long tail keywords. As search trends are constantly changing, it’s important to continue to expand and refine your PPC keywords list over time to make sure you’re getting the best possible return on investment (ROI) for your ad campaigns. 

If no one on your team has experience managing Google Ads or creating and managing PPC ad campaigns, then we highly recommend that you don’t try to tackle this yourself. PPC ads cost money every time someone clicks on them, which means that if you don’t know the ins and outs of PPC advertising, you may be wasting your budget on strategies and tactics that just don’t work.

Instead, you can hire a Google AdWords management agency to help create and manage your campaigns. Our agency not only has experience managing PPC ad campaigns for small businesses from a variety of industries, but our team stays up-to-date on the latest best practices and strategies.