What Is Paid Search and Can It Work for Your Business?

So what do you do if you don’t have the time to wait for organic marketing to do its job?

How can you speed up the client capture process and start getting traffic to your website ASAP?

Try paid search!

Not sure what paid search is or where these results appear on a search engine? 46% of Internet users don’t either.  Paid search ads can increase your brand awareness by up to 80% and also bring a lot of traffic to your website. Yet, so many businesses do not realize this opportunity and utilize paid search to grow their businesses.

So, let’s learn about paid search marketing and why your small business needs it.

What Is Paid Search Marketing?

Simply, paid search is a type of digital marketing where a search engine like Bing, Yahoo!, or Google allows someone to buy and show advertisements on their search engine results page (SERP). Search engines update their results pages once in a while, but you can check this article to get up-to-date information about what SERPs are.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

The most common type of paid search marketing is Pay-per-Click advertising. This works through one of the search engine’s advertising platforms like Google Ads or Bing Ads. (There’s paid search on social media websites like Facebook too, but that is for another article.)

To create a PPC ad, you bid on keywords relevant to your business through one of these platforms. The highest bidders for the targeted keyword get listed in the search results where these paid ads are displayed. The price you bid for your targeted keyword becomes your Cost-per-Click (CPC). When somebody clicks on your ad they are sent to a web page you specify and you get charged for the CPC you bid for the target keyword.

The more strategy you put into choosing your keywords and creating your ads, the better value you get from your CPC and the PPC ad itself.

Why Does Your Small Business Need PPC Marketing?

Paid search differs significantly from organic search both in the methods you use and the length of time it generates results. An effective digital marketing campaign uses a combination of organic and paid search marketing because they do offer different results and they complement each other.

Here are the 6 key benefits of paid search marketing that describes why you should consider it as part of your digital marketing stratregy.

1. Get Results Fast

The biggest advantage of paid search over organic search is the speed it can generate results.

No matter how well you optimize your website or content, it still takes a very long time for organic search to do its magic. It may take months. On the other hand, you can start a PPC campaign in the morning and get results by the afternoon.

2. Generate Better Leads

Not only does PPC advertising get you more traffic, but it also gets you better traffic.

You get to chose the keywords that directly related to your business and the goods or services you provide. So you can reach web site visitors that actively search for the products you sell or services you provide.

This results in more qualified leads going directly from the search engine to your website.

3. Target Customers through Local Search

Are you a brick-and-mortar business hoping to drive customers to your website as well as your physical location? PPC ads work great when you want to target customers through local search results.

People often search for local businesses on their mobile devices while they’re out and about. So much so that mobile searches contributed to $1.4 trillion retail store sales in the U.S. in 2016.

A paid advert that appears in a mobile search will help local customers find you quickly and easily.

4. Boost Brand Recognition

Even if a user does not click on your paid advertisement the first time, they still see your brand associated with the keyword. This helps build brand awareness as your name appears under multiple search results for the same industry.

The more often potential customers see your brand and a link, the more likely they’ll click on it at some point.

5. Measure Your Results

Another major benefit of PPC advertising is the clear measurement of results. You can track your paid search campaign through the search engine platform to see what’s working and what’s not.

You can review the number of clicks and the visits to your site, how much each click costs (CPC), and how many sales you generated from these clicks. This allows you to tweak and improve your campaign so you make the most of your paid search marketing budget.

6. Don’t Break the Bank

When you run paid search, you pay for every click that brings visitors to your site. If you are implementing a successful PPC strategy, the chances are that you may generate a lot of traffic to your site, but the high amount of clicks may also increase the cost of your campaign. The nice thing with paid search platforms is the capability to control how much you spend. You can set limits and make sure that you stay within your marketing budget.

Since you can narrow down your target audience,  it’s more likely that your paid adverts will bring in highly qualified visitors who are ready to buy and easier to convert. This makes a higher return on investment possible. So it is very possible to recover the money you spend on paid search marketing.

The fact you can measure results and make adjustments at any time also makes it easier to keep costs under control and boost your returns.

Find Cost-Effective Solutions with a Knowledgeable Digital Marketing Partner

Now, you should have a good idea of how paid search marketing can benefit your small business. However, what PPC marketing entails is not really that simple. There are various ad types and methods available which require you to know which works for which scenario. There are also different statistics that need to be interpreted to develop the right PPC strategy and optimize running campaigns to make them profitable.

You can actually log into your Google Ads or Microsoft Ads account and manage your ads yourself. Unfortunately, paid search may become pretty expensive without any return, if you don’t have the time to manage your accounts or if you don’t have the know-how.

But you are in luck, because we can help. Hire us as your inbound marketing partner and we can implement paid search for your organization the right way. We have the right tools and a lot of experience to offer you profitable PPC campaigns.