How to Harness the Power of SEO & PPC
Dana DiTomaso explains on the most recent Whiteboard Friday that SEO & PPC aren’t at opposite ends of the spectrum. In fact, using both of these can have excellent benefits for Google Ads. The truth is, SEO can learn alot from what happens in the PPC side of things. You can improve your PPC from understanding what’s going on in your SEO.
Let’s look at the common mistakes and how to correct them.
Mistake #1 - Using Too Many Keywords
Most often when doing PPC, people use too many keywords in each campaign and ad group. For example, if you’re doing Google Ads for a Carpet Cleaner in your local city, don’t just add 40 “carpet cleaner” keywords into one campaign. Rather, create multiple campaigns that have only 2-4 keywords in each ad group. Doing this allows you to have more control over what’s specifically happening in your campaigns.
Mistake #2 - Using the Wrong Match Type
If you’ve been doing Google Ads for while, you’ll know about the 4 different match types: broad match, broad match modifier, phrase match, and exact match.
Best practices here include starting out a campaign using exact match and broad match modifier. If your campaign isn’t getting enough impressions, then increase your radius, add more markets, or consider using some phrase match keywords.
Mistake #3 - Only Using One Ad Per Group
Mistake #4 - Not Using Emotional Triggers
- What are ways they’ve helped their clients?
- What problems are they solving?
- What feelings do they have after providing the service?
Mistake #5 - No Call to Action
Be really specific on what you want the person who’s viewing that ad to do when they see it. Examples of using great call to action include asking them to register for free samples, providing a free sign up, using sitelinks as a micro sales letter, asking a question that provides the need to use their service. Just tell the ad viewer what you want them to do.
Mistake #6 - Where's Your Extensions?
Google Ads includes something called Extensions. These are things that show under the ads like addresses, hours of operation, phone numbers, or specialized call to action. Ideally, you should use every type of call to action that you can when creating ads. Later, as your ad campaigns are running, you can determine what’s working best and fine tune your control.
Using Extensions are also great because on mobile, your ads take up more space. This pushes down the competing ads and allows you to claim more digital real estate. All of this increases the possibility that the ad could work more effectively on your behalf.
Extensions won’t work all the time, but, just by using them, it’s possible that they could create a trigger and cause a click or conversion.
Mistake #7 - Not Separating Display & Search Ads
Always, always, always, keep your display and search separated from each other when creating and running Google Ads campaigns. Really, display ads and Google Ads are a totally different experience. By trying to keep them together in the same campaign, you really won’t know what’s working and won’t have control over the process. Don’t mix those two up. Make sure to uncheck that by default.
Start Using Google Ads
If you haven’t tried using Google Ads yet, we encourage you to try it out. Create an account, create one campaign with a few ad groups, 4-6 keywords, and 3 ads per group. Start things out with a small $50 budget and see what kind of results that you get.
If you need help, we provide Google Ads training or can create, run, and manage your Google Ads for you.
Thanks for reading! Good luck out there!
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