Are Pay-per-click Ads Right for Your Business?

Hi, I’m Carol Scalzo with Hit-the-Web Marketing and today we’re talking about is pay-per-click marketing right for your company? Pay-per-click is a model of Internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your website rather than attempting to earn those visits organically. Search engine advertising is one of the most popular forms of pay-per-click.

In a pay-per-click campaign, you pay Google however much you wish to have them list ads for your site at the top and right of the organic search listings. When someone clicks on your ad, you pay the current cost per click from your budget.

There are eight questions you should ask yourself about pay-per-click marketing.

Is Your Website SEO Friendly?

Is your website designed to be search-engine friendly? Learning to design a search-engine-friendly website requires a systematic approach. Have you researched some high-performing keywords? Are you placing keywords strategically on the page between pages and interlinking? Are you including meta and title tags? Do you keep your content updated? Do you have a minimum of about 300 words per page? Are you using images sparingly? Do you avoid using frames? Are you building incoming or back links?

How Does Your Site Rank?

The second question to ask yourself about pay-per-click marketing is, does your site rank well in the organic search engine results page? There are some really good tools out there. One tool I find very effective and helpful is Serps.com’s Rank Checker. This one gives you an idea of where your pages actually rank organically so that you don’t necessarily have to pay for clicks.

Is the Age of Your Site Affecting Its Rank?

Do you have a new site that has been optimized for the search engines but is not old enough to rank well yet? It’s possible for a site to be crawled or indexed within four days to four weeks, but it may take longer. The time it takes to do this crawling and indexing varies based on the popularity of your site. Does it have any inbound links in it? Are you increasing popularity using social media, commenting, guest blogging, and email marketing? Is the content crawlable? How responsive is your server and what type of content do you post?

Think about how your site is built and how clean the code might be. The most popular content management systems, for example, WordPress, contain extremely clean code, making them easy to crawl. Does your site contain a site map—that XML file? It should because this shows the search engines just how the pages interlink. This relates to the site structure and how well the pages are interlinked in fact.

Should You Utilize Paid and Organic Listings?

Do you want to increase your overall click-through rate by having your company appear in both the paid and organic listings? Infrequently clicked results actually drop toward the bottom because they are less relevant and frequently clicked results bubble toward the top. Targeting people who have already visited your website or application via re-marketing lists for search ads always produces higher click-through rates than targeting the same keywords to people who have never heard of you.

How Does Your Site Rank for Keyword Phrases?

Do you need to fill the holes for keyword phrases for which your site does not rank highly  in the search engine raking?

Do You Want to Know the Traffic a Keyword Generates?

The next question is, how much  potential traffic does a given keyword phrase generate? This can help you plan for your website development or SEO program. Highly competitive keyword phrases can be expensive to use. Find low-competitive and high-search-volume keyword phrases and your website will rank to the top faster.

Which Keyword Phrases Generate the Most Traffic?

Do you want to test which keyword phrases convert the best for your current website? The search console tells you which keyword phrases are getting clicks to your website pages. Use these keyword phrases for better rankings and successful performance. If there are keyword phrases for which you want better ranking, pay-per-click can get your company to write  them faster.

Will You Control the Landing Page?

The last of the eight questions to ask yourself about pay-per-click marketing is, would you like to control which landing pages visitors used to enter your website? Landing pages have a very specific purpose, and that purpose is conversions. A landing page entices visitors to take one specific action, such as lead collection for you to get an email from them, for them to buy a product, or for them to register for an event.

Is Pay-Per-Click Marketing Right For Your Company?

If you answered yes to any of the eight questions, pay-per-click marketing could benefit your company. Know there are things you can do today to start increasing your leads. Schedule a 15-minute session. Give us a call or request a consultation. A pay-per-click consultant is standing by with Hit-the-Web Marketing to answer your questions.

To review, the benefits of pay-per-click marketing is that you can get fast results for your website search display. You can boost traffic, you get more conversions, you have better brand awareness, you get higher ranking more quickly, there’s an equal playing field among your competitors, and it helps you gain an edge.

How do you know if pay-per-click marketing is right for your company? You need to have a budget. Consider having $500 to $1,000 a month to invest in pay-per-click marketing. It is an investment. Make sure you are investing in other areas of digital marketing, and make sure you’re confident in your pay-per-click experts. Are they well rounded in other digital marketing efforts, such as social media, search engine optimization, blogging, landing pages, and engaging content?