Pay-Per-Click: Costly Mistakes to Avoid By Mark Bullock

{3:55 minutes to read} If you are considering Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, there are many providers to choose from including Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Google is the largest player in the game, raking in 80+% of the search market.

Years ago, getting visitors by utilizing PPC was fairly easy, but today the competition is formidable. For the amateur, it is easy to make costly mistakes, but being mindful of just a few key factors will save you money and frustration.

Key areas to pay attention to:

Geographic area: One effective method of narrowing down your “visitors” within a few miles of your territory is to simply use zip codes.

  • Professionals such as attorneys or CPAs receive the lion’s share of their clients from within a certain geographical area. Simply put, it’s a waste of money to pay for clicks from people who are far away from you and your business.

Keywords and keyword phrases: Making the most of keywords is essential to narrowing down unwanted clicks. For example, if the simple word ‘divorce’ is used, too wide of a net will be cast. However, if the keywords or phrase is more specific, such as ‘best divorce attorney in NYC’, many of the unwanted clicks will be avoided.

  • Be wise and choose your words carefully that are relevant to the content of your site. There are companies that charge tens of thousands of dollars to do keyword research when setting up new accounts.

Landing page content: Ensuring that the landing page contains the terms or keywords that someone searched for is imperative. If a person arrives at the first page and doesn’t see what they are looking for, they will be gone in the time it takes to click their mouse.

  • Note: Your bid rates are largely controlled by the relevancy of your keywords to your ad copy to your landing page.
  • Be aware that if someone is looking for a specific area of your practice, you are far better off sending them directly to that page, as opposed to the homepage, first. For example, if you are a divorce attorney and a potential client wants specific information regarding a page of your site or a specific blog post, send them to that page/post first. It will contain more relevant information, and the searcher will be more satisfied.

Without these three key factors, you’ll end up spending money on unwanted visitors. Also, you will require a bid rate significantly higher than that required for somebody who does have all of the relevancy in order.

  • Lastly, you want to give searchers a reason to click through.
  • To achieve this, make sure your ad copy is compelling!

How are you getting the majority of your clicks? Have you had luck with a PPC campaign?

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Mark Bullock
Telephone: (631) 754-0800
Email: Mark@phoneBlogger.net
Website:phoneBlogger.net

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