What is PPC and why should you consider it for your business?
Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising strategy that businesses use to place their content at the top of the search results pages for certain keywords. Usually, these are high-volume keywords that a target audience is searching for. Each time someone clicks that PPC ad, the company pays Google for the click.
PPC cost per click (CPC) is based on how difficult it is to rank for a given keyword. The more competition there is to rank for that keyword, the higher the CPC. Getting this right and not blowing your budget on paid search is somewhat of a science, and it happens to be our specialty.
Can my competitors target my branded keywords with PPC?
Yes, this is a common tactic. Savvy competitors will not only bid for their own branded keywords, but will pay to rank for the branded keywords of their competitors. That means that potential and existing customers looking for you on Google will first see an ad from your competitor.
While this is perfectly legal—albeit a bit of a grey area—there are many ways to overcome this tactic. Our Google Adwords services can help!
Whereas companies can use PPC to pay for search traffic to their website, SEO is a different game entirely. SEO means structuring, writing, and optimizing pages to improve organic search traffic. For all intents and purposes, this means pleasing the Google algorithm.
However, both SEO and PPC comprise the principal parts of a broader search engine marketing (SEM) strategy which any company that wants to compete on the digital landscape should consider.
Again, our goal is to drive valuable clicks and qualified leads to your website without getting too spendy. One of the ways we do so is to exclude negative keywords from your campaigns—keywords that are likely to attract unqualified clicks and traffic to your website that have little chance of converting but drive up your PPC costs.
Done right, PPC can deliver faster results than SEO, which is a much longer (but still very necessary) play. And PPC offers a distinct opportunity to directly engage prospects where they are—Google—with conversion-optimized ad copy that speaks to their pain points.
Well, the short answer is that most laypeople who are searching Google don’t know the difference between a PPC ad—which will always appear in “position zero”—and regular old search results. They’re quite similar! And our PPC experts know how to craft eye-catching messaging for these ads that drives qualified clicks by speaking to your target audience’s needs. Because it’s strong messaging that drives clicks at the end of the day, not ignorance. Your customers have problems that only you can solve!