Improve Your Small Business Marketing with Pay Per Click

Have you added pay per click to your small business marketing plan? If you thought PPC was only for huge websites with gigantic advertising budgets, think again.

Pay per click advertising can be a fantastic way to test the sales copy on a web page before publishing that page to the general public. At one time webmasters had to create a web page and then just cross their fingers, hoping the page would be
successful. There was no way to know for sure if the right keywords had been chosen, if the headline was compelling, if the images were supportive or distracting, and if the body copy would actually sell the product or service. Webmasters had to create new pages blindly, and if the pages didn't seem to work after a few weeks, they'd have to recreate the page and start the testing process all over again. In the meantime, they wasted all that traffic and all that time.

Fortunately, technology has made this a lot easier. PPC, especially Google AdWords, has made it possible to tell almost immediately if your web page will convert or not.

** PPC Benefits

I once heard this analogy: PPC advertising is in a lot of ways like casting a huge net out on the world to see how many fish you can catch. The fish of course, would be successful website visitors. You create your advertisement, you set your
advertising budget, and then you see how many people respond.

Because you're paying for your position, you don't have to worry about slowly and cautiously earning your way to the first page of Google. Once you figure out the correct budget/ad/landing page configuration, you can have a spot on the first page of Google within minutes. Which means you can start driving traffic and testing your web page within minutes, too.

And one of the greatest things about most PPC networks is the analytics that are built in. You can get information about the number of respondents, which ad they responded to, what time of the day it was, where they saw the ad, etc. within a few hours. This makes it extremely easy to not only pin down your demographic but also determine which keyword phrases are the best. In fact, Google AdWords integrates seamlessly with Google Analytics.

** Where Keyword Phrases Come In

Discovering the right keywords and keyword phrases is the most critical component of your natural search optimization process. You can use different free services on the web to find out exactly which keywords or keyword phrases are most popular for your topic. But this method is slow and often involves a bit of wait-and-see.

With a PPC campaign, you can test out your keywords immediately. You can use your chosen keywords to create a title and copy for your PPC ad, add the keywords to your website title tag, create headlines and include them in your web page content. If the budget for your chosen keywords/ad is too high, it could mean those keywords are too competitive, or that your landing page isn"t well targeted enough. Make a few tweaks, or try a new keyword phrase.

If you're getting a decent pay per click price and a decent page position, but you get very little click-throughs, then you know your PPC ad isn't very compelling – which could mean it would make a poor headline for your web page. And finally, if
you've gotten decent ad placement and decent click-throughs, but very little sales, then you know the actual copy on your web page is lacking.

And since most PPC networks include some type of analytics, you can verify that your final keywords/ad/landing page combination is actually appealing to your target market.

But what's even better is that you can do all this quickly. Much quicker than if you had to wait out the process of driving traffic organically, collecting conversion data, trying out a new keyword phrase, driving more organic traffic, collecting more conversion data, and on and on.

** Expense of PPC

Another benefit of a PPC campaign is that you have a great deal of flexibility with cost. You are able to determine how much you want the campaign to cost you per click and even set a maximum budget for each day. You can start a campaign for just a few pennies a click, so PPC advertising is well suited for even your small business marketing budget. Granted you will get better placement and better timeslots, in most cases, when you pay a little more per click. But until you're well-versed in the "PPC Game" you're better off keeping your budgets small in the beginning.

So, if you want to drive some immediate traffic, do some easy keyword research, and quickly test your web page copy and conversion potential, consider adding PPC advertising to your small business marketing plan.