A business needs to take advantage of the many different ways they can drive more traffic to their website, increase revenue, and skyrocket brand recognition, which will help them achieve their goals. Search advertising is a great way to do this, which works closely with organic search marketing to help a business gain online traction. It’s also an excellent way for companies to earn revenue. According to Google, companies receive around $2 for every $1 they spend on paid advertising on Google Ads. 

Still, the mere act of spending on ads won’t necessarily get you the visibility you want. For pay-per-click ads to work, they require solid foundations, involving a lot of planning, implementing, and refining. Without having a sound strategy in place, you’ll risk burning through your budget and have nothing to show for it. In this two-part article, we’ll discuss the steps required to build your PPC strategy.

Step 1: Identify Your Goals and Build Your Budget

You can create a paid search strategy to accomplish any goal, but it’s essential to define them first. Doing so will allow you to tailor your plan accordingly to ensure you meet your goal. However, you’ll want to make sure your goals make sense for your business, are specific, and align with your overall digital marketing strategy. For example, if your marketing goal is to increase website traffic, your PPC strategy must strive to attain a high click-through rate.

Then, you’ll have to make sure that your paid marketing goals do not go against your organic marketing activities. Review your organic share of voice for keywords you want to focus on with your paid search strategy. Figure out how much share of voice you achieve through SEO efforts and who is capturing the paid traffic. Use these to determine the keywords to add to your PPC campaigns.

After that, you’ll need to create your budget by deciding on the number of search terms you want to bid on and how many clicks you can reasonably expect from these keywords each month. The number of clicks you get depends on many factors like the effectiveness of your ad copy, the design of your landing page, and others. 

Step 2: Study Your Competitors

The next step is to study the competitive landscape, which will give you a good idea of who your limited paid search competitors are. Analyzing their campaigns will also provide you with insight into what they’re doing that successfully gives them the results they want and how confident your campaign needs to be to match or surpass them. If you aren’t sure who your competitors are, you can use tools like Alexa’s Audience Overlap to uncover the sites targeting your audience. Then, you can use the Competitor Keyword Matrix to access a list of organic and paid keywords from up to 10 competitors. 

You can also use Google Ads to help you surpass your competitors in rankings. Using the Target outranking share feature causes Google Ads to raise your bids to help you land the top spot. However, you can target only one domain at a time for that spot. It may help to work with a Google Ads specialist as well.

Step 3: Research User-Centric Keywords

Lastly, you’ll need to start researching the keywords your target audience uses to look for your products and services. Using the previous step will give you a list of competitor keywords, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. 

Think of broad keyword terms around your products or verticals to incorporate into your PPC strategy. For example, if you sell artisan home furniture, you may want to start with “artisan tables.” Then, use Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty tool to build on this term with related keywords. If your website has a search function, look through all the searches from the last three months and categorize them. You can use some of these terms in your paid ad campaigns.

Finally, go to your website’s Google Search Console and look for organic keywords with a high click-through rate. They may also perform well when used in paid search campaigns, making it something worth considering.

Conclusion

Building your own PPC strategy can be intimidating, especially if you have no prior experience. However, following this guide and working with a PPC agency will help you create a top-tier PPC strategy that gets you the results you want. Stay tuned for part 2!

Discover My Business is a digital marketing agency providing PPC, web design, marketing automation, and video production services to businesses hoping to gain more visibility. Contact us today to find out more about how we can help you!