Any qualified SEO consultancy will be the first to tell you building an online reputation for your website is tough. The Internet is saturated with websites, so it is difficult to get any exposure on popular search engines as the established websites are already occupying the top results. Pay-per-click is an effective method to raise awareness and get traffic flowing to your website, which ultimately builds up the rank of the website thus giving it more exposure. Not only is pay-per-click a way of appearing on the top search engine pages, but it also enables you to target keywords so that you only attract the relevant target market to your website. An SEO expert can help you set up the perfect pay-per-click campaign.

How Pay-per-Click Works

Advertisement suppliers such as Google AdWords offer pay-per-click advertisements on their search engine results. These are shown at the top of the search results page under “Sponsored Links”. The order in which these sponsored links are shown depends largely on the amount the advertiser is willing to spend and the popularity of the keywords and SEO content. The process of setting up a PPC advertisement involves going through an advertisement supplier, customising your ad, and then bidding on how much you will pay for every time someone clicks your ad. Of course, to go through this process smoothly a significant amount of research is required before hand to determine your budget and to judge which keywords are the most profitable.

Hiring an SEO consultancy to handle your PPC campaigns is the best way to make the most out of this form of advertising. They will do all the groundwork, so you don’t have to.

Will PPC Make You Money?

Pay-per-click is possibly the most efficient and effective way of getting more exposure to already established sites and new websites. The reason it is so effective is because you are directly targeting the relevant audience through the keywords your ad is associated with. This means that anyone who gets to your website through a PPC advertisement is interested in what your business has to offer as they would have searched for the keywords associated with your business.

Additionally, PPC advertisement provides you the opportunity to determine which keywords are popular, so you can correctly optimise your website with keywords that will get you a good return. Furthermore, the advertiser has full control of how much they want to spend over a period thus allowing them to create a pre-determined budget that they can manage.

This means there are no surprises for you and your business. You can work intimately with your SEO consultancy team to ensure you get the best results. Of course, to be successful with using PPC you must do your research before you put your money on the line. The keywords you use must be properly researched and the content in your ad must be persuasive enough to get clicks on it. Leave it to your SEO consultancy to handle.

A common mistake made by advertisers is to direct the PPC ads to their homepage. This not only detracts from the integrity of the ad, but also increases the chance of you losing potential customers. A better way to do it is to direct traffic to a page on your website that specifically targets the keywords and clearly provides information on what is being offered. Constant monitoring of the campaign’s performance is essential in ensuring that it is yielding the results required.

Disadvantages of PPC Advertising

The main disadvantage of PPC advertising is the competition for popular keywords; this often leads to a steep rise in the cost-per-click and makes it a very expensive method of advertising.

Although this can be avoided by using smaller search engines for PPC ads, it isn’t nearly as effective as using the more popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo. This limitation makes it almost impossible for smaller businesses to afford pay-per-click advertising and hinders their business from growing because they cannot reach their target market.

The good news is that this limitation is not as detrimental. Now it’s possible for businesses to show up in paid advertisements even if they cannot match the financial capabilities of some of the bigger businesses. The other slight disadvantage involved with PPC advertising is that you are limited to a certain amount of characters to describe your business and with people becoming more and more aware of sponsored results being paid advertisements this can be a bit of an issue. However, the fact that you do not have to pay until the consumer clicks on the link means that it will not result in any further expenditure.