Many small businesses are using PPC or Pay Per Click. It has helped them to compete with larger players with limited marketing budgets. But with each passing year, the competition has increased as click pricing has increased. Additionally, paid search has become far more complicated over the years.
It’s easy to set up ads using Google Ads Manager, but you are paying for its services. Setting it up correctly is crucial as failing to set up Google ads correctly can drain your entire budget with minimal returns. Such mistakes can be dreadful for small businesses as they do not have bigger budgets than the bigger players to risk.
What is Pay Per Click?
Often termed PPC marketing, it is a form of digital marketing where an advertiser pays for each ad clicked. It lets advertisers put their ads on search engines, other websites, blogs, news websites, social media platforms, video streaming sites, and mobile apps. Essentially a PPC campaign needs three types of information from a marketer, i.e. keywords, ad copy, and bid/budget.
After advertising the above criteria, an ad goes through the auction system. Advertisers with higher bids get more exposure till they have the required credits in their accounts.
What is Paid Search?
A kind of PPC marketing paid search is the first marketing often used by advertisers to experiment with PPC advertising. An advertiser can choose the type of searches they wish to appear for in the search engines through paid search. Ads appear on search engines when a person searches for the selected keyword on the search engine.
Ad position of an ad is dependent on the bids an advertiser has placed and the quality of each search engine campaign.
Benefits of Paid Search for Small Businesses
PPC Generates Interest While You Do Your Business
Small business owners are often very busy with their day-to-day operations. Growing your business demands time, but you don’t need to manually generate leads or ask customers to visit your shop personally.
Paid search plays a crucial role here as it allows small businesses to develop their business by generating leads and obtaining sales.
Achieve Your Business Goals
Paid search advertising helps small businesses to achieve their business goals. It requires a few months to build interest when using different digital marketing methods. However, when using PPC marketing, small businesses can respond immediately after their Google ads go live. Thus, they can expect to meet their goals directly and not wait for months before getting any response.
Tips To Get Best Output from Paid Search
Paid search is beneficial for small businesses if it’s done correctly. Although it gets competitive each year, it’s essential to identify the correct goals and implement campaigns to get the best return on investment.
Use Free Advertising Coupons
New advertisers can use promotional advertising credit offered by Google. The amount provided changes from time to time, and advertisers get specific credits based on the amount they spend on advertising.
Never Bid For The 1st Position
As small businesses compete with large companies, they do not have the same budget as the larger competitors. Hence, bigger competitors have the budget to pay higher prices than smaller businesses.
Small businesses need to have a different mindset than the larger ones for paid search. Instead of dominating the top spot for very competitive keywords, you can get better returns if you target lower positions of the result page.
Follow Your Competitors
Being a small business, you have the benefit of using their research. Larger companies usually do a lot of brainstorming before implementing a strategy. Hence, you can follow them and copy their strategy. Do a quick search for each keyword you are targeting to see how your competitors are faring. Check the messages they are using and the type of USP they push for their ads.
You should also observe their website, especially their landing pages. Things to check include the design, the content, and the tactics they adopt for generating leads and sales. You can copy such strategies as implemented by your competitors.
Focus on Long-Tail Keywords
You can generate a lot of traffic by targeting long-tail keywords as they have less competition than the head terms as most competitors might have already bid for them to list higher.
Targeting keywords having less competition means you have to bid less to appear among the top SERPs. It means that with lower click prices, you get more traffic according to your budget.
Use Manual Bidding
Google’s machine learning capabilities are used when you choose automated bidding. It helps to bid the perfect amount for each search. The system has improved over the years, and Google keeps improving it further. Many businesses have also seen drastic performance improvement after switching to automated bidding.
But automated bidding has its learning phase. During the phase, the system tests and learns what is perfect for your business and what isn’t. You may see a poor return on the money you spend on your Google ads.
Depending on the traffic each campaign generates, the learning phase will take its own time. If the campaign has a big budget and gets substantially higher traffic, the learning phase will be over in some days only. But as small businesses have small budgets, the learning phase usually takes longer, which might not be feasible to handle.
As a business, you do not have enough time to set up campaigns and research. Hence, contact Affordable SEO Company if you are searching for a reliable service provider to take care of your digital marketing needs in Tampa, FL. They have been an experienced agency serving businesses for the past several years.