Baton Rouge area businesses interested in developing a robust Social Media campaign, cannot simply stay within the boundaries of free resources. The ideas discussed in this article dive in to one paid service that is worth every penny.
What is SEM or PPC? Search Engine Marketing or Pay Per Click.
While most of the services and techniques I recommend are either inexpensive or free, SEM-PPC is a great way to pay for visitors. I’m not going to touch on all of the scenarios that could make a great SEM-PPC campaign, as that could get very expensive very quickly, but I am going to talk about how to effectively manage a strategy with the largest Search Engine on the planet, Google.
How to get Google working for you…
Google’s two main Advertising technologies are AdWords and AdSense. In short, AdWords are what you see on the right hand side of the Google search result page. Those companies bid on the keywords you used in your search. AdSense can be seen when you view a webpage and in the content of the webpage you see double lines beneath keywords on the page. The company linking to these keywords pays the site owner when you click on them.
In my opinion, AdWords is the most useful for small business owners that have an offline business, so AdWords will be our focus for the rest of this section. Google takes it one step further and allows local businesses to only propose their ads to customers in their targeted cities or areas. Even better!
I usually recommend software and technologies that a non-techie or novice web master could implement with ease. Google AdWords is one that I feel fits this criteria very well.
To get started go to Adwords.google.com and signup for an account. You enter your keywords (see the section on keywords for a basic understanding) and Google shows you how much you are going to be charged each time a customer clicks your ad (pay-per-click). What’s nice is that you can set your monthly budget to whatever level you are comfortable. Depending on your cost per click, I would set something that would yield about 100 clicks per month to get started.
At the end of the first month, review your clicks and charges in AdWords. Then use your Google Analytics (see the previous section for more details) to see how people are flowing in to your site. Is your advertising working?
Another note to consider,
if you use the techniques I explained in earlier posts about SEO, Blogging, and website design, you may already be at the top (or close to it) for your keyword set. You will need to weigh whether paying for the clicks you would be getting naturally from search results is logical. You may want to consider changing your keywords for your AdWords to cross-promote your business.
For instance, a photography business is at (or toward) the top of the search results list for the keywords “photography, photographer, baton rouge, etc.”. The owner could set their AdWords to those similar to “prom dress, wedding dress, etc.” so their ad for photography shows up to users searching for dresses. When this is done properly, you expose your business to potential customers before they begin to look for your type of services. Your business will be their basis-for-comparison.
