If you are not familiar with PPC, it stands for Pay per Click. There are few different types of advertising and PPC or Pay per Click is one of them. In this advertising method, you pay certain amount of money to Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bing etc. where you choose your ads to be displayed.
If you are a small business owner and rely on website traffic to make sales, you certainly understand that more targeted traffic you have on your site, the more sales you will make. While there are ways to increase your organic traffic or search traffic to your site, they take time and not every business owner has the luxury to wait that long or has the skills to pursue that endeavor. One sure fire way to generate that targeted traffic to your site is by paying for PPC advertising
PPC advertising is not cheap. Depending on your niche and selected keywords, you may pay dime or nickel to as much as $30 plus per click. More competitive your niche is, higher the cost of your PPC campaign. It is therefore extremely important to identify the highly targeted keywords that will generate some targeted traffic to your site and at the same time not being massively used by other marketers. By identifying these keywords, you will get targeted traffic and at the same time keep your bid cost low due to low competition for those keywords.
Let’s go over an example. Say your company offers professional photo editing services. You will head over to Google Keyword Planner to find the targeted keyword you will use in your PPC campaign. Just searching for “photo editing” will give you a list of keywords but you need to be more precise in your keyword search. You need to think like your customers and figure out what they will search for while looking for your service. May be instead of searching for “photo editing”, “photo editing services” will be more targeted keyword. Broader the keyword is, lower the bid cost will be.
Another way to identify the hidden gem keywords is by searching for service specific keywords. If under the photo editing umbrella, you offer other photo editing services, you search for those specific services to find low competition keywords.
For example, if you are a clipping path service provider as a part of your photo editing service, then search for “clipping path service” to find the related keywords that have some search volume but low competition. Do NOT bid for the keyword “clipping path” as this is not a targeted keyword your potential customers will be searching for. People who search for clipping path might be looking to find educational materials on what clipping path is or how to do it on their own. You need to identify the keywords that your potential clients will be searching for. So, think like your customers.
Now that you know how to perform your keyword search using Google Keyword Planner, here is another side kick for you to take on that will help you reduce your PPC bid cost. Google looks for landing page content quality and gives each page a quality score. Higher the quality score is, lower the bid cost will be. So, it’s extremely important to properly optimize your landing page for the targeted search term you are using in your PPC campaign.
Let’s use the term ghost mannequin photo editing service as an example. If you are bidding for the term “ghost mannequin photo editing service”, you make sure your landing page is optimized for that search term. The term needs to appear in the page title, on the first sentence of your page in title or heading, then under several sub-headings. Not to mention it needs to appear naturally several times though out the content of your page.
Conclusion: Long story short, you need to target broader match keywords for your PPC campaign to reduce bid cost. It is also important to optimize your page content to make it relevant to the PPC campaign you are running not only to reduce bid cost but also to maximize conversion.
