how to use google adwords correctly
Website last updated: Saturday April 27, 2019
If you want to have your web site high in Google's search results, unless you can succeed in the generic rankings game, (the not paid for results), you need to use Adwords. Most people who search using a search engine, only look at the first page of the results. That represents the top ten entries. In order to get in that top ten results you need to run an Adwords campaign usually referred to as a "pay by click" campaign.
It’s not that well known but Google uses an auction rather like eBay to price its clicks. You decide how much you are prepared to pay to make sure you appear on the first page and if anyone offers more they are likely to rank higher than you. The difference compared to eBay is that Google also ranks your advertisement and your website search engine optimisation and factors this into the ranking position too. It is therefore possible that a more expensive bid by a competitor will still not rank as high as you do because of a better design of advertisement or website. Importantly the process is repeated every time someone does a search as if it were the first time. This obviously makes every search unique.
The above technique gives slightly different results each time depending on what your competitors are doing so anyone who says they can absolutely guarantee your advertisement on the front page should be treated with caution! It requires time spent analysing keywords, making sure that your website content is highly relevant and investing in SEO optimisation. Despite all this difficulty, you will get your site high in Google’s rankings if you advertise with them and you will find it high on the appropriate search page all the time you advertise with them. You still need a well designed, search engine friendly, web site however else Google won’t rank it high and neither will all the other search engines!
As an example my son runs his own driving school business in Telford Shropshire and occasionally uses Adwords to get more customers. Suppose someone types "driving lessons telford" into Google's search engine. It might be worth £2.00 to him if someone clicks on it. He might be prepared to pay more if the customer lives local to where he lives so maybe £2.50 for a click when someone types "driving lessons Trench".. On the other hand if someone is searching for his business by name, i.e. AES School of Motoring, there is not much point in paying a lot as the searcher knows about him anyway so maybe 50 pence a click? He would in fact, choose several key phrases and assign a different value to each.
The cost’s above are “invented” but last time he did an advertising run his average cost per click was only 98 pence. (Please note that some keywords are much more expensive).
Keywords can be tricky. Using my son's web site campaign as an example, during his first advertising run I discovered that he had offered a higher bid to Google for one set of keywords compared to another. The only difference was a letter "s". I then changed the maximum bid on the phrase "driving school telford" so it was the same as "driving schools telford" and within five minutes the advertisement was on the first page on both search phrase results. I noticed the change because I study the statistics that Google send me. It's not rocket science but it is time consuming if you are to get it right.
You can target your advertising to one specific town so if my son chose Telford as his target area the advertisement would not appear anywhere else. This ensures that someone searching for “driving schools” in another area would not see his advertisement.
By studying the statistics it is possible to find out which key words people are searching for, how many times they have searched and get various other information such as how to modify the key words both on the advertisement and the associated web site. This requires quite a lot of study to start with and then after two or three months the keywords are usually working well and it is then only necessary to modify them on a sporadic basis when people start searching differently for example. Bearing in mind that the associated web site also needs to be modified for maximum affect so the keywords on that need to be changed too. (If you want to see the keywords on a web site, right click the page and click “view source”. Look for a line near the top that starts <meta name="keywords" content. You will see all the key words listed although they are missing on many sites).