People say money can’t buy happiness. Uhh, have you ever rode a jet ski? I’d say those are pretty damn fun. Disney World, where happiness is born. Tickets to a OneRepublic concert (if you mix them up with One Direction, you’re practically asking to get hit), a Chipotle burrito, going to a Mariners game, hell, a pitcher of beer and late night bowling. What do all of these have in common? They all expanded their reach of customers and grew sales through digital advertising.
I suppose you were expecting me to say something more sentimental.
Don’t frown just yet, because we’re going to take a closer look at paid search and how to put your business on the same level as Mickey Mouse, so you too can be affiliated with the same feeling as Christmas morning and have your business be numero uno.
In my previous rants covering SEO, inbound sales, and online presence, we need to start to tie it all together. The first thing is ciphering Paid vs. Organic Search. Our oh-so familiar friend, Hubspot has yet another ebook that describes the process of paid search, but because I know you just want the good stuff, let me break it down.
“Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a term used to describe the various means of marketing a website via search engines, and entails both organic search engine optimization and paid search strategies. Organic search is based on unpaid, natural rankings determined by search engine algorithms, and can be optimized with various SEO practices. In contrast, paid search allows you to pay a fee to have your website displayed on the search engine results page (SERP) when someone types in specific keywords or phrases to the search engine. The SERP will display the ads that you create to direct viewers to your site, and the fee you pay is usually based on either clicks on or views of these ads.”
TL;DR: you can pay for better positioning with Paid Search
Here’s the catch: 70% of people choose organic links and only 30% click the paid ads. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily, it still increases your web presence, which is better than nothing. But there are ways to use it more effectively!
Use it as a complementary tool, not a substitute for anything in your marketing. You can use it for Landing Page A/B testing because it allows you to direct traffic to your choice of pages, split the traffic to different pages, and find which convert at the highest rate. Not so bad, right?
Keywords — bidding on keywords may better serve you in the query search for relevant content.
But one of the biggest reasons to consider paid search is because of the ranking advantages it gives you. Remember that comment I made about nothing existing past the first page of Google search results? Well, sadly, some people believe that, and paid search will keep your name above the fold so it practically slaps your customers across the face when they search for their solution.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
- Keywords
- Ads
- Landing Pages
You start out by giving Google a list of keywords, which tells Google to display your ads on the results page when people search for those keywords. You then design your ads to be shown for these keywords, and your goal is to make them both relevant enough to the search query and attractive enough to get the searchers to click on them. Then, when viewers click on your ads, the ads direct them to your landing pages. The goal of your landing pages is to get the visitor to convert in some way – by buying your product, downloading an offer, etc.
Have I lost you yet?
Okay, let’s pump the brakes.
If you’ve heard of paid search, you’ve probably heard of pay-per-click (PPC). This means you DO NOT pay for your ad to be displayed, and you DO NOT pay when viewers roll over the ad — you pay when they click it. Works like buying ice cream, you don’t pay until they have it in their hands and are half way into experiencing the wondrous joy you just sold them.
This is absolutely much better than paying per impression (CPM) which would be your customer scrolling past right past the ad and you already paid for it.
So how do you do it? According to Hubspot, “Google uses an auction-style bid to set their prices. For any given keyword, you have the top bidder – let‟s say they bid $5 for someone to click on their ad. Then you have the next highest bidder who values a click at $4.50, another at $3.75, another at $3.00, and so on, all the way down to the last person who says that they value a click on their ad for that keyword at, let‟s say, $2.25.”
Key factors to keep in mind in this field of marketing are to set a budget from the get-go, and have a strategy laid out before you throw on your 10-gallon hat and jump into a bidding war for keyword. And yes, that digital marketer you just hired, probably a good idea to have them track metrics. Specifically, impressions, clicks, conversions, and spread.
I swear, this form of advertising is effective, despite the surface level uncertainties.
You’re a hard sell. I like a good challenge though. So let me rebuttal by quoting Search Engine Watch: “…with an effective strategy and execution of paid search, in tandem with an already existing SEO strategy, you can expect to deliver traffic and conversions that you probably didn’t even know were there just from praying people find you organically”.
Reason being is organic rankings are volatile, while ad rank is certain. It’s about as unpredictable as fantasy football; one week you’re on fire, and the next week you tank so low nobody would even look at you for a spot on their bench. And no one can really figure out what the hell just happened. But ad rank is pretty consistent, like getting that Christmas card every year from Grandma that always has some money in that Hallmark card she sent you. Go for the certain option; go with Grandma.
What is Ad Rank? On Google, it’s combination of your bid on willingness to spend on a paid ad space + (ad relevance + ad experience + landing page content + expected click through)
You also can expect 2x the visibility. If your competitors are listed once on the first page for a priority keyword, while you’re listed twice due to organic search and paid search, you just hit the jackpot and are at a clear advantage if the rankings are comparable.
Finally, increases in conversions have been reported to be as high as 200% as a result of combining SEO with paid search.
TL;DR
SEO strategy + paid search = winning
brianhaug 
ditto
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