Wednesday 6 July 2011

Google Adwords- some basic advice

Fast Track to Google Presense
If you have a new site and want to get noticed on Google then AdWords is certainly the fast start option. Within seconds you can be there on the front page of google for your chosen search terms and get some traffic to your site. However there is a price to pay as AdWords is not cheap. Now dependant on the competition for the search term you would typically pay between 20p and £1 per click through. Now this might be very acceptable for an ecommerce site which is selling products at high margin but for the majority of websites this is for sure a large overhead. Here I am not going to provide every answer for each circumstance but simply to provide some guidelines to get started. If you need more details you will need to use an IT Services company or specialist google AdWords consultancy.

The basis steps:-
The first step is to perform some basic keyword research assisted by the google AdWords tool to identify which are the right keywords for your site. The focus here needs to be around relevancy as the prime factor and then go for the keywords with the least competition. The basic principle behind the operation of AdWords is that you bid for places on the right hand side of the google window and then the top 3 places above the natural search listings. In simple terns the more you bid the higher you will appear on the listings.
The next step is to set up your google AdWords account.
From here I will just provide some top tips on things to do so you get value for money.
1. Restrict the hours of use to the periods when your real customers are actually going to be browsing. You do not want someone from the USA to be browsing your site if you only ship products in Europe and this will be costing you money.
2. Set you budget and then adjust your bids for each keyword to get a good usage of that keyword across the day and ideally just finish the day below your budget. Avoid bidding too high as this will mean that you will get a few top listings but consume your budget in an accelerated fashion.
3. Regularly check the keyword traffic and compare the keyword traffic to the eCommerce conversions to check that you are not just getting browsing but actually securing sales.
4. Run your AdWords campaign in tandem with your SEO activities and progressively swap in and out keywords as the natural listing results move higher and lower to ensure that you have the keyword visibility for the right search terms.
5. Keep a close watch on AdWords activity to check where you are getting traffic from with conversions and then dynamically adjust your bids to focus on the search terms right for your site.
So that's the basics so now is the time to give it a go. monitor and continuously improve.