It's never been a particularly well kept secret that you can buy your website a good listing in the Google search results for just about any keyword you want.
If you've ever done a search on Google, and who hasn't, you have no doubt seen sponsored listings. They appear on the right side of the search results page, and often up to the first three listings on the left side. These websites are using "pay-per-click" (or "PPC") advertisements through Google's AdWords advertising platform. When you see a sponsored listing, that is an impression. When you click a sponsored listing you are taken to the advertisers website and that advertiser will incur a charge from Google. In other words, that advertiser pays Google per each click their ad receives.
The price you ultimately pay Google, will be impacted by your landing page quality score. Quality score is determined by a lot of different factors, including the relevance of the page content to the search term, and the Click Through Rate, or "CTR".
Click through rate is the rate of clicks to impressions. If your ad is displayed 100 times, and receives 10 clicks, then your CTR is 10%. A high click through rate signals to Google that you are showing a relevant ad for the search phrase, and this will improve your quality score for that keyword.
The higher your landing page quality score, the lower your actual cost per click will be. AdWords is essentially an auction. You bid on keywords. In very simple terms, the more you bid, the higher your website's ad will be displayed.
Now there are a number of valuations and specific calculations Google makes to determine where your ad will be placed. These calculations happen in real time when a search is being conducted. We'll take a closer look at the specifics of these calculations in a future article. For this article, it is just important to understand that what you bid, is not what you will pay for a click. If you bid $2.00 for a click, and your quality score is 5, you will pay more for a click then if your quality score is 7, and you will never pay more then your bid, or $2.00, for a click.
Remember Google's first priority is to show relevant search results, even for the paid results. Certainly they could just give the first spot to the highest bidder, but that would only ensure the website willing to spend the most money would be listed first. The highest bidder however, may not be the most relevant search result.
The best example of this is your company name. Let's say you are Adidas, and you want to bid on the keyword "Nike". The most relevant search result for the keyword "Nike", is obviously the Nike website. Google is going to give Nike a higher quality score for that keyword, in effect rewarding them for their relevancy for that keyword.
Before we look at tips to improving your quality score, it's important to also understand match types. There are three match types you can and should bid on for each keyword. They are exact, phrase, and broad match types.
- Exact Match: Exact match is the best keyword to bid on. An exact match means the search phrase being searched on is an exact match for the keyword for which you are bidding. For example if you are bidding on exact match for "Accounting Firms", your website's ad will be displayed only when someone searches for "Accounting Firms".
- Phrase Match: Phrase match means your keyword is a phrase within the search string. For example, if you bid on a phrase match of "Accounting Firms", you ad will be displayed when someone searches on things like "small accounting firms", or "accounting firms and CPAs".
- Broad Match: Broad match essentially let's the search engine decide if the search phrase is a match for your broad match keyword or not. Bidding on broad match keywords is both important, and dangerous. It's important because a broad match for "Accounting Services" might be triggered when someone searches for "accounting firms". It also can be triggered when someone misspells a word, such as "acounting services". The danger is that Google may decide that "Accounting Supplies" is a close enough to "Accounting Services", and trigger your broad match keyword. This is why Google allows advertisers to declare "negative keywords". We'll talk more about negative keywords in a moment.
Ad Copy
Your ad copy should reflect the search phrase, or keyword you are bidding on. The person doing the search will be more apt to click an ad that includes their search string. For example, if you bid on "CPA Services", you want the headline of your ad to be something like "Quality CPA Services". If your ad title says "Bob's Financial Consulting", the searcher then has to stop and decide... if they click your link, are they going to find what they are looking for? They often make their decision within a split second, so you don't want the prospect to have to stop and think. Give them exactly what they want. If that means writing 50 different ad titles for 50 different keywords so be it. Your work will pay off in the end.
Landing Page
The landing page is the page on your site that the searcher is taken to when they click your ad. Usually this should not be your website's homepage. If someone searches for "Strategic Business Planning", they should be taken directly to the page on your website that explains your business planning services rather than a generic accounting related homepage. If the ad goes to your homepage, and they have to search through a big pile of CPA related content just to find your website's business planning page, they'll probably just "bounce": hit the back button and go to the next advertiser.
If your website doesn't have a suitable landing page for the keyword, add one. It really is that important.
Similar to the ad copy, you want to take as much of the decision making out of the process as possible. Make it as easy as possible for the searcher to find what it is they are looking for. Google will reward your quality score for having a landing page that is specific to the keyword, because it improves the search experience for people who find you through their search engine.
Negative Keywords
Just as important as knowing what keywords to bid on, is knowing what keywords you don't want to trigger your ads. This is very important because of phrase and broad matching. To continue our example, if you bid on the broad match of "accounting services", you may not want your ad displayed if someone searches on "accounting supplies", so if your ad starts pulling in clicks for the keyword "accounting supplies" you would want to add "supplies" as a negative keyword.
When a search phrase includes one of your negative keywords, Google will not display your ad.
Location Targeting
I've saved the best for last. Location targeting is extremely important, especially for firms that provide a service such as accounting or CPA services. If you provide CPA services you will want to be able to meet with your client, and more importantly the client is very likely looking for a accountant close to home. Having prospects 100 miles away clicking on your ad is going to become a huge waste of money.
There are two ways to target a location. The first is to target your ads to only be displayed within a certain radius, such as 10 to 20 miles from your business location. You might bid on more general keywords, like "tax preparation", within a very specific location.
The second way to target location is with very specific keywords in a more general area. For example, you might display your ads to anyone in California, or even the country, if they type in the specific keyword "Los Angeles CPA" or "Los Angeles Accounting".
Keep these basic principles in mind while you're setting up your websites with AdWords campaigns and you'll find the learning curve a lot easier and your initial results will be a lot more profitable!
Brian O'Connell is the owner and founder of CPA Site Solutions, a CPA website design firm building and maintaining more than 4000 accounting websites for firms throughout the United States. Please take a look at his growing list of CPA Website Designs to get design and content ideas for your own website.
(c) Copyright - CPA Site Solutions. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
Permission granted to republish online provided the author attribution, the article, and the author bio are reproduced in full.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Brian_L._O'Connell
