Using Google Adwords – Step 1 – choose a budget

The Google Adwords market is constantly changing depending on who is bidding for the keywords you want, how they are bidding and how much they have to spend. Keeping this in mind you will have to make some simple decisions before you can get started.

I sat down with a business owner today and she wanted to bid for every keyword she could think of, everything relating to her field of business, but the problem with that is that you are then competing with everyone else for a whole lot of words. We ended up choosing fewer words and decided to spend more to get people to our website using those keywords. If website visitors who come to your website from a Google Adwords advertisement and stay and explore your site Google will recognise your site as a good result for its searches and this will end up elevating your position in the “relevancy based” search results. That should be a significant goal, but I am now just digressing.

So, the business owner agreed that she was going to spend $1200 per month. The next step is to figure out which services she is going to promote and she gave me a list of 15 different services,which we then categorised into 4 main categories… Phew. We then looked at the relative weighting for each category of her business to decide how much they will receive of the $1200 per month and it came to a relatively simple 25% split each or $300 each category (division) per month. These were good figures because that comes down to $10 per day and that is how you can limit the amount of money you spend on Google Adwords…. by setting a daily limit.

The next step is a little more time consuming and involves choosing the right keywords and keyphrases to use for each category of the business. Once you’ve discovered this you choose how much you are willing to pay per click… hence the term Pay-Per-Click (or PPC) advertising (adwords.google.com). You may not get this part right the first time, but you will soon realise that you can pay for anything from 9c to over $20 per click to be on the first page. The more generic and popular the keyword the higher the price, the more words you combine together (keyphrase) the fewer people will be promoting it so the price will be lower. I’ll cover this in another blog post.

UPDATE:

Learn about alternatives like using relevant keywords in a blog for your business to make your website more valuable and ensure it becomes a trusted resource for customers.