As a small business owner or employee, you’re always looking for ways to expand your business. Most likely you have a website and you’re heard about Pay-Per-Click(PPC) advertising on Google or Yahoo. You decide that it would be great if you could put your advertising in front of internet users right when they are searching for your product. But what are your potential customers searching for?
Do Some Keyword Research
The key is to find keywords that are related to your business AND that are being searched regularly. A great tool to find out how much your keywords are searched each month is the Google Keyword Tool. You can type in a few sample keywords that you think are related to your business, or, if you choose the 2nd radio button, you can put your own URL in the box and Google will tell you what keywords it thinks your website is related to.
As an example we’ll pretend I’m an Idaho florist, so I think it makes sense that people might be searching for “Idaho florists”. So I type it in.
And I get some results, but I want to see all the data Google has. I select Show All from the drop down:
And now we see some good information:
So What Does This Mean?
First we notice that there are over 2,000 local searches for idaho florists. That’s 67 potential customers every day. Then we notice that a lot of searches include the name of a city (ie rexburg idaho florist or nampa idaho florist). Hmm. We probably should look for cities close to my mom’s florist shop or this isn’t going to work. “Florists in Pocatello Idaho” only gets 12 searches/month, but someone I can help this person. Write this one down. Actually, what if we run the search for Pocatello florist instead?
As you can see, now I’ve found some terms that get more searches AND these are people looking for a florist in the area. BAM! Take some time and run a few of these searches. Write down the best terms because these are one of the primary ingredients for our small business PPC campaign.
About Robert
Thanks for the heads up! Getting started with PPC marketing is simple and easy. However, businesses do have two choices when starting such a campaign, they can either choose to run it themselves or have an outside company do it for them. There are several programs out there that allow you to run your own PPC campaign.
Lapeer County
Pay per click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content sites, such as blogs, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system.
Websites that utilize PPC ads will display an advertisement when a keyword query matches an advertiser’s keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to or above organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a web developer chooses on a content site.
One option is to make sure you have enough startup capital from your own investments or outsiders (bank loan, private investors, etc). A second option is to ease into the business so that you start doing it on a part-time basis until you know that it will make enough money to support you.