The Science of Paid Search Marketing: A Newbie’s Guide

Do you want quick results when marketing your online business? Invest in paid search. Here’s a beginner’s guide to paid search marketing.

Did you know the average small to medium business directs around 46 percent of their marketing budget towards digital marketing?

If you’re looking to create a digital marketing budget, you might want to focus on search ads. That’s because search ads allow you to create targeted ad campaigns that will deliver a significant return on investment.

Here’s a quick look at how you can get great results with paid search. If you want to get more out of your marketing budget, you’ll soon learn how search marketing can help you.

Let’s begin!

1. Which PPC Platform Should You Use?

If you’re new to PPC marketing, you may be caught between Google Search Ads and Bing Search Ads.

For the most part, Google Search Ads is generally the best approach for most people.

This is because most people use Google when performing a search, and so it’s easier to reach your target audience on that platform.

Now, advertising on this platform can be more expensive, but this is a price worth paying as the quality of traffic is much higher.

Thus, for the rest of this post, we’re going to focus on Google Ads, and how you should approach this platform.

2. How Do You Find the Right Keywords?

Selecting the right keywords will determine a large portion of your success in regards to search engine marketing. If you choose the wrong keywords, your ads will not be shown to the right people, and thus your ads won’t produce any results.

So, how can you select the best keywords for a search campaign?

Well, one option is to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. In doing so, you might be able to identify some of the keywords they’d type into Google to find a business like yours.

The other option is to use something known as the Google Keyword tool. This is a free tool offered by Google, which allows you to determine which keywords are worth targeting.

To use the tool, you just have to log in to your Google Ads account and click on the ‘Tool and Settings’ icon.

Once you’ve done this, you will then see a drop-down menu, and you need to select the ‘Planning’ option from this menu. Upon doing so, you should then see a bit of text that says ‘Keyword planner.’

If you click this text, you will be able to use the keyword planner for free.

When using this tool, all you need to do is provide it with a basic keyword associated with your niche.

So, if you own a software development company, you might type in something like ‘software development.’ The tool will then show you a list of keywords associated with this niche. The tool will also return the CPC and search volume of each keyword.

Generally, the keywords with the highest CPC tend to yield the best results. This is often because the price of a ‘click’ is typically tied to the value of the traffic.

3. Optimize Your Landing Pages

Selecting the right keywords is only half of the battle when it comes to running Google Ads. This is because you also need to focus on optimizing your landing pages.

The landing page is the page people see after they click the ad. If the landing page is no good, people will click on the back button and then go to a competitor’s site. This results in you losing money since you paid for the visitor, but they didn’t buy from you.

If you want to optimize your landing page, you should focus on maintaining a high level of ‘symmetry’ between the ad and the landing page.

For instance, if you highlight a specific benefit in the ad, make sure people can easily access that benefit once they click on the ad. An example of this could be a free report or perhaps a free consultation.

Additionally, you want to make the landing page as simple as possible.

That’s because if your landing pages allow people to do lots of things, people will get distracted. Following this, they will not take the actions you want them to take, and this can then result in wasted ad spend.

Following this, you should try to identify the one thing you want people to do, once they reach your landing page. You then need to optimize your landing page, so that it encourages visitors to take this one specific action.

4. Optimizing Your Ads

After a certain amount of time, you will also want to focus on optimizing your ads. In doing so, you will be able to generate better results without having to increase your ad budget.

If you want to optimize your ads, you will need to dig through your data, as you’ll then be able to identify optimization opportunities.

For instance, after going through the data, you might find that most of your conversions occur during a particular time of the day. If that’s the case, you might set things up so that your ads only run during certain hours.

Also, after looking at the data, you may find that a particular keyword is producing better results than the rest of your keywords. As a result, you might adjust your ad budget so that more money is spent on a particular keyword.

Will You Invest in Paid Search?

If you get it right, paid search can transform your business in an incredibly short amount of time.

If you’re new to search ads, it’s vital that you take things slowly. If you rush into things, you might lose a lot of money, and you may never want to use search ads ever again.

Following this, just think about spending around $10 to $20 per day, to begin with. In doing so, you will learn how search marketing works, and you can then increase your budget once you get some results.

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