Sometimes expansion is the best way of boosting your online visibility. As soon as you succeed in one arena, go off and explore others. Whilst SEO still remains the logical starting place, have you considered stretching your search engine marketing efforts to Pay per Click advertising?

Paid search is a fantastic way to tap into the highly targeted traffic that Google offer but without the same complications as organic search. Adverts can appear both at the head of search results and to the right; this gives them great prominence and ensures a steady stream of traffic to those who appear highest.

The ads are ranked in terms of their relevance to the search phrase, the landing page’s quality score and by the amount the site bids for the term. This means that there is still plenty of work to be done if you are to get to the top and not have to pay well over the odds for the privilege.

A quality score of between 1 and 10 is assigned to the page on Google AdWords. This will reflect how well it is optimised, the bounce rate of the page and other factors such as load time. Therefore it is still important that you spend time optimising your website and ensure that the pages that you’re linking to are relevant and offer visitors exactly what the adverts offer.

PPC gets complicated when it comes to actually creating the advertising campaigns themselves. Google’s popular AdWords platform allows you to choose from broad match, phrase or exact when for the ad type; in short these are:

Broad match

Your advert will appear for the keywords used when setting up the campaigns. This means that synonyms and sometimes more abstract interpretations of your phrases can occur, causing wasted clicks and losing a little relevance. However this can be reduced by including more keywords and getting negative keywords removed from the campaigns.

Exact match

As the name suggests, when exact match is selected the advert will only appear when that word or phrase is used.

Phrase match

This is where the primary keyword has to appear within the search phrase used for it to appear.

Keywords and negative keywords play a significant part in creating a successful PPC campaign, particularly where broad match is used. The clearer you are with these, the better your chances of eradicating unnecessary clicks and keeping your Click through Rate (CTR) healthy.

But hold on, what’s CTR? Well, the Click through Rate is a percentage assigned to each campaign that measures the number of clicks an ad receives compared with the number of times it appears for searches. The better this percentage is, the more relevant the site will appear to the search terms.

As we’ve already established, relevance is a key factor when it comes to determining where a site ranks within the PPC standings and also how much you have to pay for your bids. Therefore it is imperative that your CTR is high and your ads are properly targeted, with the right keywords pointing towards the most relevant page.

Consider your advertising language too. You don’t get much room to manoeuvre when it comes to a PPC adverts. On Google AdWords you will have 25 characters in the title and 70 for the main body text, so choose your words wisely. This is your opportunity to really earn the click and catch the attention of searchers.

Once you have a fully optimised campaign you’re ready to start boosting your traffic. Unlike with SEO, PPC can deliver results within days. Yes you will need to keep an eye on budgets and ensure you are targeting the most profitable times of day, but these are things that you can refine as you test. The important thing though is to ensure maximum search exposure, which is why PPC (back up with SEO) is so important for so many websites.

Author Bio: Stephen Logan works as a Copywriter for leading SEO Company Impact Media. They offer a full range of search marketing solutions including expert Pay per Click Management Services.

Category: Internet
Keywords: PPC Advertising,Pay per Click,Pay per Click Advertising,Paid Search,Broad Match,Google AdWords