People often ask me about the best way to promote their business online. Far and away, the most effective tool available to you is Google Adwords. Yet, many small business owners are not even aware that Google Adwords exists. This is part one in a series that will teach you how to effectively use Adwords to promote your business.

What is Google Adwords?

Adwords is an advertising system that allows you to buy links on search engine results pages. Say you sell blue widgets. You type “blue widgets” into the Google search box and see that a lot of blue widget businesses are showing up in the search results, but yours isn’t. You feel like if you could just get your web site in front of people who are looking to buy blue widgets, you could really increase your sales. But how do you do that?

The answer is Google Adwords! Google Adwords allows you to put a link to your business on the first page of search results, like so:

In this example, the search results that are circled in red are actually paid links.  If you set up a Google Account, you can put a link to your business on the first page of Google, too. This is by far one of the most effective ways to market your business because your ads only show when someone is actively looking for the item or service that you sell. Right off the bat you have a much more interested audience than you would via traditional newspaper, magazine, or radio advertising. Additionally, Google Adwords is much cheaper than other types of advertising and has a higher return on investment.

How much does it cost?

Google sells Adwords ads based on a cost-per-click basis. This means that your ad runs for FREE until somebody clicks on it. You ONLY have to pay when somebody clicks your ad. Depending on the keywords you choose, you can pay as little as 25 cents per click, or as much as $15 or more.

Keywords? Huh?

Keywords are the words that people might use when they’re searching for businesses like yours. So the first step in the process is to sit down and make a list of key phrases that people might use to find you. For example, if you sell T1 Service, for example, some of your keyphrases might be:

• T1 Service
• T1 Service Dallas
• Dallas T1 Service
• Cheap T1 Service
• Affordable T1 Service
• Best T1 Service
• T1 Internet

(Don’t worry if you don’t know what T1 Service is. It’s just an example.) When you set up your account, you’ll want to specify which keywords you’d like Google to use to trigger your ad. After all, you wouldn’t want your T1 Service ad to show up when somebody’s searching for blue widgets (or vice versa). You only want your ad to show to people who are specifically searching for your product or service.

We’ll get to the process of entering keywords in the next section. For now, let’s focus on how to choose good keywords.

How to Choose Good Keywords

First, brainstorm. Come up with a list of key phrases like the one above that you think people might use to find you. Then, take that list and put it into Google’s Keyword Tool here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Google will show you how many people are searching for your keywords every month, and how much advertiser competition there is for that word. It will also generate a bunch of additional keywords that are related to the ones you already put in. If you go down the list, you may see some good ones that you didn’t think of yourself.

Ideally, your best keywords will be the ones with the most searches and the least competition. The less competition your keyword has, the cheaper it will be to run an ad on that keyword. The more competition you have, the higher your cost per click will (likely) be. (This is not always true, however, and there are some tricks you can use to lower your cost per click. We’ll get into those later.)

Peruse the list and make a master list of all the keywords you think might have potential for your business. Now we’re going to find out how much each of these keywords will cost every time someone clicks on your ad.

Using the Google Traffic Estimator

Now, go to https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox
and enter in your keywords one per line. In the Max CPC (which stands for “Maximum Cost Per Click)  box, put something high like $30. (Don’t worry. We won’t actually set up a campaign with a keyword that costs $30 per click. This is just for estimation purposes. We want it high to make sure we can get a picture of how much traffic is really out there.)

Click the “Estimate” button. Now, for each keyword, you’ll see a breakdown of how many searches it gets, your estimated average cost per click, your estimated ad position (the lower the number the better your ad visibility), and your forecasted daily clicks.

From here, pick your most effective keywords, which will be the ones with the highest traffic and the lowest cost per click.

In the next post, I’ll show you how to set up an optimized Google Adwords campaign that gets you the most bang for your buck. Stay tuned!