Does PPC Work for Small Businesses?

What is PPC?

PPC advertising helps drive traffic to your website with speed and flexibility. Pay-per-click means you only pay for a PPC ad when a viewer clicks on your ad. This is also known as cost per click.

Answering does PPC work for small businesses could just be a simple yes; when 85% of consumers use the internet to search for local businesses, the question seems to answer itself. Let’s discuss how PPC works for small businesses below.

Fine-tune your PPC

It’s easy to decide you want to do PPC and jump straight in, but that may end in confusion and a lack of the results you want to see.

Following every step-by-step guide to PPC across the whole internet would be exhausting and a waste of time. Recommendations will vary based on the business. With that being said. let’s outline some methods to get started on the right foot.

Cost-effective 

You decide the spend you want the campaign to have each day. The joy of PPC is that you only pay when your site is clicked through from your ad. This means that you’re not wasting spend when people read your ads but aren’t interested in your business.

Keywords 

Keyword selection is key as 0.16% of the most popular keywords are responsible for 60.67% of all searches. 

When it comes down to keyword research and selection, there are a lot of best practices, and it’s not always easy to follow them all, so here’s a handful to get you started on the right foot. 

Consider search volume

Search volume is how often people are searching for your keywords, you can do this using the AdWords keyword planner. It’s important that you know how popular the keywords you plan on using are, and how relevant they are to the campaign.

Don’t just go for low-cost keywords.

It sounds easier to look for the cheapest keywords and just choose plenty of them, sacrificing traffic for cost, you may think. Wrong; in actual fact, you could end up with more clicks for a lot fewer conversions. 

Negative Keywords

Maybe there’s an overlap between your business name and a celebrity or a kind of cheese. Whatever it may be, you can add it to a negative keyword list which is essentially the direct opposite of your target keywords.

By adding a negative, you’re letting Google know that you don’t want to appear in the search with that specific query in it. Much like your target keywords, you can do a broad, phrase or exact keyword negative.

Targeting 

PPC campaigns aren’t just about getting visitors, they’re about getting relevant visitors. You can tailor your PPPC campaigns to target people who are relevant customers for maximum effect. You can specify your location and the radius where you want your ads to appear and negative out locations where you don’t want to appear. 

PPC and SEO

PPC and SEO complement each other. While your PPC attracts more traffic to your website, your SEO helps your organic rankings. Used together, they can help you boost leads and sales simply by populating page one of the search results pages.

To deepen your understanding, read our previous blog, How PPC and SEO Work Together, where we explored this further. 

Call to Action

Be direct. When paying for an ad you may as well make it worthwhile. Tell any reader what it is you want them to do exactly and make it easy.

Does PPC work for small businesses – a summary 

If done right, PPC can greatly benefit businesses of every size. For small businesses especially, there are a few key sticking points to really make your campaign worthwhile. 

Take the time to ensure keywords are relevant and specific to your business. This is, so they target the right audience to your site to gain conversions. 

Start small; if you operate nationally, but you’ve just started, target a small customer base around where you are located. Once you’ve got to grips with PPC, broaden your radius and conquer other areas.

Be straightforward with your audience. Tell them exactly what you want them to do and make it easy for them to do so. Adding obstacles for your customers to hop over before a conversion point isn’t a great practice. You’ll end up with confused customers and a low conversion rate.

For more on PPC, download your free guide to find out why you should hire a PPC agency.

If you need PPC but don’t have the time or knowledge to do it yourself, don’t worry ROAR’s PPC Management Services are here to help.

Our team of specialists are equipped with the know-how and skills to get your ads running and converting.