How To Target Keywords in a Knowledgeable Manner On Google Ads

Google Ads is a great platform for online paid marketing and really can offer a lot of insight and a general boost in your business’s online visibility.

While there are many different moving pieces to Google Ads, one very important piece of the puzzle is bidding on keywords. What this means in the simplest terms is, you build your ads and target key phrases people may type in on Google Search. Google Ads has a pay-per-click model which allows you to set a price for what you are willing to pay when someone clicks on your ads.

As any bidding system goes, the highest bidder gets the top bid, but how does this work for smaller businesses when you are up against corporations?

There are ways to be able to pay to play and give a good run up against bigger businesses with a higher budget for ads. Here are a few tips below:

Use Auction Insights for Competitor Info

Auction Insights is a wonderful tool to be able to see how competition is doing based on the keywords you are trying to bid on. You are able to see how others are fairing on the Google ranking, how much you are sharing the Google search with them and other key factors.

Knowing this knowledge can allow you to see who is your direct pest control competition, what they are bidding, and be able to visit their websites and see their ads to be able to focus on their keyword efforts.

Do a Little Mathematics and Research of ROI

You are able to see next to the keywords in which you are bidding for, a graph to see what types of increases will occur as you increase your bids.

This is a great way to see whether or not a keyword is worthwhile to increase a bid for. You may see that adding $.50 to a bid will increase impressions by 4,000 individuals or that increasing for $2 will increase the click rate by 5.

Taking this information and then doing the math to see what your cost per conversion would be or how the increase in impressions may allow you to reach more people, you can make more knowledgeable decisions on what may be a smart bid increase and what may just be wasting you more money.

Analyze Past Performance of Keywords

You may have a keyword that worked a couple of months ago and brought in many conversions but now it no longer is working. Or, you may have a keyword that never was shown due to low search volume but now things have picked up and you are getting traction.

This is where the Google Ads interface can help you make decisions on what to bid on when it comes to keywords. You are able to see when keywords did great and when they fizzled out and make a decision as to why.

Perhaps, you sell winter clothes and it’s now summer and your keywords are not doing well. Or, you are a pest controller and a pest that is not in season is now doing poorly. These situations obviously come down to seasonality, but the point being is that you can see the analytics and decide whether the decrease makes sense or if you need to investigate more.

Target Mid-Level Keywords

Many people think that to get the best return you need to focus on the most popular keywords, but for smaller businesses, this may not pan out.

If you own a dress shop, then targeting “dress shop” may be harder for you to place when there are many dress shops out there. Unless you have the ability to bid for first page bids, it may be better to look at mid-level keywords. These are the keywords that are not super popular but do get a decent amount of traction.

An idea for mid-level keywords may be taking your target keyword which may be “dress” and attaching it to a local city you sell to which can make it more micro but allow you to place higher on Google Search without paying as much.

While these are just a few quick tactics, hiring a pest marketing professional to dig deeper into the analytics and correctly bid for specific keywords is a smart investment.