Before Google’s advertising program ‘Adwords’ appeared on the scene, creating a Google friendly website and targeting the free organic listing was the only option. In stepped Adwords, this offered businesses the opportunity for a page 1 ranking in no time at all, albeit a paid option.

(The adwords listings appear in the red boxes, the organic listings in the Google box)

Now Adwords management companies can deliver first page results and plenty offer a great service in doing so.

However over the last couple of years I’ve spoken to quite a few people and clients that have been offered Adwords management and 1st page rankings from companies claiming they are somehow associated with Google, and are authorised Adwords resellers when clearly they aren’t. The sales pitch is misleading and the service that they offer although it sounds like a great deal isn’t quite as good as it seems.

The pitch usually includes:

1. First page on Google permanently over the duration of the contract

2. Unlimited clicks for the traffic that will go through your website

3. 24 hour, 7 days a week listing.

4. Buy in bulk keyword offers

Number 4 is a falsehood, and if you’ve a daily budget then the others are clearly untrue as well.

I was recently speaking with someone who ran a campaign with one of these companies.

He was originally offered 5 keywords for £99 pounds for the 1st month and a small set-up fee of £30. For good measure an additional keyword was thrown in and the set-up fee waived.

The cost of the clicks came out of the £99, which was a nice sweetener. But hold on isn’t there an obvious conflict of interests here? the less clicks you have the more money they make.

The keywords were also very low competition and the number of search also very low.

I had a look at the report and what’s interesting is that atleast 4 of the keywords were pure rubbish, not just long tail keyword but non-existant terms that would never drive more than a couple of people to the site over the course of a year. The 2 major keywords according to Google estimates could be in position 1-3 for 4p, and with only 4 or 5 ads showing for those terms a top 3 placement isn’t going to break the bank. In fact if there was more than a few pounds of traffic through the pay per click adwords I’d be absolutely amazed.

When I had a look at the report, I noticed that nowhere does it mention clicks, it actually mentions impressions!

In the print in the email with the report it states ‘Impressions are the number of people that have actually seen your advert in google.co.uk’.

So when someone does a search on one of those 5/6 keyword terms that counts as an impression even though there’s no click thru to the site. It’s all bull.

With impressions for the month just over 100, even with a click thru rate of 5% that’s 5 clicks. Looking at Google Analytics for the main term and the only one that has a change of driving any traffic at all there was just 5 clicks, and the time spent on the website was minimal.

The report also noted that the terms were exact match, and that extensive keyword research had been conducted (ha ha).

It sounds like a good deal to an unsuspecting client but it’s Limited Adwords without the keyword research, campaign management and accountability.

I understand that for a £99 pound Adwords campaign the company can’t promise the earth, and that they have their costs, but atleast some amount of honesty and visibility might not be too much to ask for. The value the client was getting was also very poor.

You can find a list of authorised Google Adwords Resellers here.

Interestingly when you conduct a search on the name of one of these companies a listing comes up for from Google to ‘use an authorised’ reseller.

1. If your business is a local business, then when people do a local search using regional terms why not benefit from a listing appearing at the top of Google. Promote your business on Google Local, it’s free!

2. Add your site to 4NI and make sure that you get the best out of a 4NI listing. Choose your copy carefully, add images, and make your listing as enticing as possible. Don’t just slap up a 4 line paragraph of untargeted terms. 4NI dominates the local search landscape and can drive quality traffic to your site. At £200 plus for a search optimised listing it’s certainly not cheap but worth while.

3. Make sure you site is Google friendly. If you want to promote your site on Google then consider hiring a web design company that understands the importance of on-site Search Engine Optimisation, either that or pay heavily later. If your site hasn’t been optimised for Google then get it redone.

4. Make use of Pay Per Click. Pay Per Click has it’s benefits and although it can be expensive it can provide a good return on your investment provided it’s done well. It can also work very well with a targeted SEO and Local Search campaign. 3 pieces of real estate on the front page of Google for your main keyword terms increases your company’s credibility and chances of a lead.

5. Include local regional keywords in your page title, keyword and content. One of the biggest mistakes or missed opportunities that I see time and time again is local business websites leaving out regional terms. If you don’t let Google know that your site is a local pizza restaurant in Belfast, then you’ll struggle to reach your online market.

6. Your website is your 24/7 online shop window. If the average lifespan of a business website is 4 to 5 years then judge your budget accordingly. A £500 website isn’t going to cut the mustard in most sectors. Invest in a great design, it’ll reflect positively on your company image.

7. Create the best content that you can. If you can’t write and have a large enough budget then hire a copywriter. Use the best images you can, offer the best advice you can. Creat the best product your can, offer the best support you can.

8. Besides 4NI, add your site to other local and niche directories that approve listings editorially. These still have value not just with Google but can also bring you targeted visitors.

One such up and coming directory is lookaly.com. Maybe I’ll write a bit more about some of the new local directories in an article I have in the pipeline about the next ‘4NI killer’. When adding a listing make sure to write unique and good descriptions about your company and it’s services, sell your business.

9. Search the top 100 or so listings for your primary keywords, if you can’t get listed in Google for your primary terms then get listed on the sites and directories that are listed. If you have to pay for a listing then so be it. Raise your profile on sites other than yours that you target market visit.

10. Contact the site owners of relevant sites, write a personal email with details of who you are and what you do. Why should they link back to your site, have you great content that their users can benefit from, what’s your angle? Don’t send automated emails to all and sundry.

11. Get links from other sites with keyword rich anchor text. For instance this is my ‘Belfast Web Design Company’ rather than ‘Click Here’. The text used in the first instance is more descriptive anchor text and a stronger indicator to a search engine about the relevancy of the web page.

12. Use video to promote your business. Even I’ve started using video for web marketing. Text works, but video can work even better, it helps raise your profile, personalises your site and connects with your audience. You might want to think about using video on your ‘about us’ page.

13. Use photographs, photographs are another way that help personalise your company. It helps people put a name to a face.

14. Take advantage of sites that let you build an online profile. Create a Linkedin account. At the moment Linkedin offers you the opportunity to have 3 follow links. If anyone wants to make a connection with me on linkedin then email me.

15. Start a testimonial strategy. Ask your clients for reviews. If you’ve offered a good service, product then why not ask your client for a review. Don’t just post them on your site, ask your clients to post them on sites such as Google. Google Local offers your clients the opportunity to post reviews so the more visibility the better. Make sure the reviews are credible and authentic.

16. Participate in forums related to your business. Contribute with valuable replies rather than just one or two lines replies. The more you offer the more you’ll benefit. It takes time but if you add value and become a respected member then the more business you’ll be able to drum up and the more referrals and bigger your network will be. You might even get links back to your site.

17. Use forum signatures, it’s free advertsing. There are plenty of online business forums, check out UKBusinessForums. It even has it’s own N.Ireland section.

18. Use classified sites such as Gumtree. Gumtree offers free business listings and is another great way to promote some businesses. Listings can rank highly in Google.

19. Start a blog. If you have time and enjoy writing create a blog, post news, events, how to’s, lists and advice. Create valuable content, just don’t post any old nonsense. Blogs are a great way to build up your authority in your niche, a way to get backlinks both to your blog and your main site. It also allows you to cast a wide net for search terms in Google that your target audience might use.

20. Blog comment. Contribute to blogs within your industry, build up friendships, add value blog posts, again not just one liners, create controversy, offer opinion, add to the debate.

21. Bookmark your site, make it easy for others to bookmark your site on social bookmarking sites such as delicious.com. If you have a blog then add a plugin such as socialable that makes it easier for your readers to bookmark.

22. Use RSS feeds if you can. Wordpress and other blog formats have a built in RSS feed. People can subscribe to your feeds from one central location such as Google Reader rather than having to visit all the sites they subscribe to individually.

23. Network and build online relationships with people. Engage with others and you’ll get links, referrals, business insights and advice. I’ve certainly learnt a lot from the contributions of other’s within the Irish SEO community including Richard Hearne, Redfly Marketing and Paul.

24. Promote other businesses that you can vouch for and they’ll return the favour.

25. Link with businesses in your niche. Avoid useless and excessive reciprocal linking schemes but swap links with businesses than can benefit your users and that help you build up relationships and referrals from your sector. No need to go overboard and link with your competitors, but if you’re a wedding cake maker then why not link with a wedding videographer

26. Create and use a signature in your email.

27. Create an email marketing campaign. Collect the emails of all your clients, all those you have sold too and periodically send them an email with company updates, product updates, offers. Although I haven’t extensive use, Campaign monitor looks like a great email marketing system.

28. You might want to pick a hosting company that is within your target region. So if you’re targeting the UK, go for a UK hosting company, or a .co.uk domain. If you do go for a .com or .net then you can still set the regional settings to UK in Google Webmaster Tools.

29. Offer a competition, freebie, or free business advice. An excellent example of this recently was local wedding photographer Peter Thomas who ran a competition to win wedding photos and by all accounts there was a tremendous response. I’ve also tried this tactic in a number of different shapes and sizes including offering free membership software from a programming site that I run.

30. Monitor your online reputation, if someone posts a negative comment about you then reply, be polite and address the situation, don’t avoid it and just leave a negative comment that could come up when someone does a search for your company. Be proactive. There’ll always be negative comments, it’s not nice but it’s not the end of the world. Most people can see through negative comments if they don’t have any value and are just a personal attack or someone with nothing better to do.

31. If you’re really brave, then attend events, speak at events and you’ll get reference links back to your site.

Try some of these for starters, invest your time and money and you’ll reap the benefits.

I read the literature with headlines such as ‘100 million visitors online looking for your products’ and it all sounded too easy.

Overbidding – I was paying $1 a click for a $39 product to be number 1 even when there was strong competition both in the organic results and PPC.

Campaign neglect – Set and forget call it what you want. I set up campaigns and left them to bring in sales, when they didn’t I simply left them to rot and continue eating up the budget.

Poor campaign organisation and management – Rather than organising my campaigns into logical divisions based on products, product features, services and geographic targeting the campaigns were poorly organised. Campaigns and ad groups where poorly named without any theme. Ad groups didn’t have parent keywords, unrelated keywords where bunched together and ads didn’t match keywords.

Broad matches – expanded matches. Irrelevant keywords were triggering ads, web design was pulling up services such as graphic design that I didn’t offer.

Going after number 1 placement – How many times do you buy the number 1 product? People do research checking product features and product prices amongst other things so paying for number 1 slot isn’t always the best way to go. You can test it out yourself.

Generic Landing Pages – I should have sent visitors to the page that dealt with the product or service that they were looking for rather than a generic page that deals with all the services I offered.

Poor Landing Pages – My landing pages where poor with, little content, no testimonials, no enhancing images and no calls to action.

Poor keyword Research – A small selection of general keywords on broad match that everyone and his dog is bidding on won’t give you the best results. There are more long details keywords that cost less but convert better.

Negative Words – running a web design campaign, I had one or two students looking for summer placements, not the best way to get a job, click my ad then call me and ask for a placement.

Poor Ads – My ads were poor, sometimes due to time constraints, poor wording, lack of keywords, blending in with the other ads or being just plain boring. Split test your ads continually, tweak and run again.

Running the best optimised ad – There’s an option to run your ads evenly rather than the best performing one, set your campaign to this setting and split test your ads.

Content Network – Leaving the content network enabled and part of the same campaign, didn’t help me measure the success and resulted poor click thru rates and poor campaign management. I also entered the content network without modifying my bids.

Poor conversion tracking – I sent all the traffic, both organic and PPC to the same page as well as not installing conversion tracking.

CTR – CTR was what mattered and was even more important than Conversion Rate and Cost Per Conversion.

SEO and PPC – I didn’t use all the data, keywords etc in my SEO campaigns to bolster my PPC campaigns.

Test, Monitor and tweak performance – Campaigns need constant attention.

These are all Adwords mistakes that I’ve made on my own campaigns and paid handsomely for the experience. Lucky enough they weren’t mistakes any clients paid for.

Figure 1 shows where you ads can appear. The PPC ads appear as ‘Sponsored Links’ on the right or sometimes above the main search results. These areas are marked with a red box, the main results are in the green box. To get listed in the green box ‘the organic results’ takes a lot longer and is a different ball game. So if your site is new then Google’s PPC program lets you advertise straightaway rather than having to wait in some cases months for your site to appear in the ‘organic listings’.

Figure 1

For the paid search PPC listings you can research and choose the keywords that you want your ad to appear for. So if you’re a dentist in Belfast you could do the keyword research and decide that you want your website to appear when someone types in ‘Dentist in Belfast’, ‘orthopedic dentist in Belfast’ ‘Dentist needed urgently Belfast’ or whatever you deem relevant.

Not only do you set the keywords you also can set the amount you’re willing to pay for a visitor. You have control of your spend and can set a daily budget. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. If they don’t click, you don’t pay.

You can set your ads to appear locally, nationally or internationally. So if you are a software company in Belfast, you might want to sell your software internationally, if you’re a painter in Belfast you might only want to target your services locally. It’s up to you.

Google Adwords isn’t simply a straight bidding auction. The more you pay doesn’t necessarily mean the higher your ad will be placed. You can pay less than your competitor and appear above them. The more relevant your ad, the better the campaign structure you use the more you’ll have in your pocket to invest wisely, and the more inquiries and sales you’ll get for your money. Appearing above your competitor doesn’t necessarily mean that your site will convert better. You need to find your optimal position. A few listings down might perform better than right at the top.

You can continuously test, monitor and tweak your campaigns to make them more profitable and effective. If a campaign isn’t working then you can simply stop it, there’s no ongoing commitment.

If you’re interested the Google Adwords learning center goes into it in alot more details. For businesses there’s no long wait to begin selling or getting leads online, PPC is immediate.

When I mention PPC people often seem shocked and respond with “why should I or why would I want to pay for a click?”

Well in the offline world If you owned a furniture store and somehow knew that there were potentially 50 couples in your area that wanted to buy a black leather sofa, and that’s exactly what your shop specialised in, would you pay to get these visitors into your furniture shop and then try and convert them into sales, or would you rather just wait and hope that they turn up irrespective of any marketing.

Chances are that they won’t know that you exist, what your prices are, or that you specialise in black leather sofas, or even if a few of them do then the rest won’t. Even if you paid them a little something to turn up you’ll still make a hefty profit if your profit margins are good and you know how to get them to part with their money. PPC works on the same basis. Target people looking for the exact product and service that you supply, and if it’s a quality product at a decent price on a decent looking website then you’re on a winner.

Below are the 10 reasons:

1. PPC is immediate. Pay per click online advertising gives you visibility straight away. Create an account, set up billing preferences, campaigns and adgroups, do keyword research, set up your landing page and you are off and running. Takes an awful lot more time to target the organic listings with a full campaign, particularly if it’s a competitive market and you’re on a new domain name and you don’t already.

2. PPC gives you a greater reach. You can target a wider range of terms and a greater geographic region relevant to your services and business that you might not rank for in the organic listings. If one day you decide you want to branch out and target the South of Ireland or the UK then you can do that straightaway.

3. PPC has great accountability. With PPC you can monitor your performance. PPC and Adwords lets you control your spend, set a budget, set the regions you wish to market in, set the maximum price you’ll pay for a click, pay only for clicks you receive, count the number of conversions. You can see your return on investment. If it’s not working then you can stop it.

4. Google Analytics. You can link your Google Analytics with your Google Adwords PPC account and track your keywords to see which ones provide leads and sales and which ones don’t.

5. The vast majority of your competitors aren’t using SEO and they aren’t using PPC, in fact believe it or not most of them aren’t even using the internet! As I’ve said before, the web isn’t just about global markets for the majority of businesses it’s about local markets, so if you’re a solicitor in Belfast, a graphic designer in Dunmurry, or an accountant in Lisburn it’s time to get an internet strategy. It doesn’t cost the world, but there are very good returns with proper investment.

6. Online Marketing has taken over from other forms of marketing. Online marketing is profitable, it DOES work. Yellow Pages and offline paper directories just don’t cut it for many business models. Not all online marketing works though, you’ll need to test them to see if they suit your business.

7. PPC can bring you targeted traffic, from targeted areas. Set a region, country or area that you wish to target and your ad will only show for that area. If you’re not too convinced about Google’s location targeting you can use regional qualifiers e.g. “Tax Accountant in Northern Ireland” and this will only show your ad when someone types in those exact words so it’s very relevant.

8. Even if you do run a successful SEO campaign in the free standard organic listings, PPC can provide you with more real estate and more clout on the front pages of Google. If you appear in both listings then that’s 1 less spot for a competitor and it can definitely be a credibility factor. If PPC is profitable then keeping it running.

9. It’s cost effective, you only pay for clicks. With a targeted campaign that’s looking for conversions rather than as many clicks as possible you can dissuade clickers. For instance I mentioned the example of an ‘expensive leather sofa’, well you can make sure your ad doesn’t show for those that are looking for ‘cheap leather sofa’. Target more specific words that are more likely to result in a conversion and you’re on a winner.

10. PPC is a great market research tool. You can find out exactly what terms people are using to find your service and product, what they are looking for and what converts. This information is a goldmine and can help you create a more profitable organic campaign or if it’s a disaster make you think twice before investing more.

Pay Per Click like Search Engine Optimisation and like Web design/development can be profitable. Businesses are profiting handsomely from their investment, maybe it’s about time the businesses (both small and large) in Northern Ireland tapped into some of these markets.