Using PPC to Make Your Website a Web Exit Instead of a Billboard

PPC, Pay-Per-Click, advertising is not for every business or website, but it is right for many. Too many business owners overlook PPC, usually because they have read or heard about it being too expensive, ineffective at delivering traffic, or ineffective at converting traffic to sales. Done well, PPC can be the most effective marketing you can do, delivering customers at low cost compared to print and other marketing.

Many of the negative comments are due to poorly designed websites, improper PPC ads, and lack of effective conversion tools on the sites. Too many business websites are like highway billboards, catching the attention of some drivers passing by, but not getting them to exit and go to the store. Here is how in three steps to get it right:

Step 1: Get your website in the proper shape for success.

If you are successful in business and satisfying customers, but you cannot seem to get a flow of solid business from your website, you just need to rework your site content and navigation to be extremely prospect friendly.

• First, how many of your prospect and customer questions does your website answer with information they will value? Even if you believe that they are all covered, are they covered as answers to questions in exclusive areas? In other words, an FAQ page is great for the visitor in a hurry and wanting quick and short answers. For PPC, you want to create a page or blog post for each of the most important and frequent questions or product features as asked by prospects in deciding to buy.
• Create that separate location for each of these important decision-maker questions and answers, and title them with the key question phrase, then giving a detailed and valuable answer in the page content. Why is separating them on pages/posts important? You need a unique URL to use in your PPC ads as discussed in the next section.
• Have navigation and internal links on important pages that help a prospect to move through their process toward a decision with few clicks. If they may have unrelated questions to the search that got them there, be sure your navigation at top or side clearly shows where it will take them.

Step 2: Create ads that are highly relevant and direct the prospect properly.

Once your website is ready for ads, broken out with content critical to a buying decision as noted above, you are ready to set up your PPC ads. Without detail, this article is using Google Ads as an example due to Google’s top position in PPC.

• Take a page with one of those questions and the content answers and use the question text appropriately for your ad title; this is crucial to your CTR, Click-Through Ratio. As an example, a page focused on answering “The Value of Trusts in Estate Planning” or “Are Trusts Useful in Estate Planning?”
• Google’s algorithms place huge value on the relevance of the content on the destination URL in an ad to the ad title and description. This is because Google’s goal is to get as many clicks as possible, with a satisfied searcher when they get where they are directed. So, if your ad is highly relevant to the destination page content, the visitor finds what the want and they spend some time checking it out or even moving around your site.
• You also want this, but there is another dollars-and-cents value to you in doing this well. When visitor see an ad with a title and description focused on their question or information they seek, they are far more likely to click on that ad, generating income for Google. Better though is the fact that Google maintains a quality score for your ad based on its CTR, Click-Through-Ratio. The higher your CTR, the higher your placement in the paid ads, REGARDLESS of your set maximum CPC, cost per click.
• You bid a maximum amount you are willing to pay for a click. While Google builds your score, you will fall lower in the paid ads display due to competitors bidding higher. However, once your CTR exceeds that of a competitor, you move above them, even though they are willing to pay more per click. Why? Because your higher CTR will end up yielding more clicks and more revenue.
• There is another component to your ad quality score; it is what happens after the searcher clicks to your site. If they bounce right off, clicking away because they do not see what they want quickly enough, you do not score well. The longer they stay and the more they move around the site, the better for your score. The better your score, the higher your position at lower CPC.

Step 3: Create calls-to-action to convert prospects to customers.

You are almost there at this point. However, if you want your prospects to take some action on your site that leads to business, you need to have the right calls-to-action. Of course, if you are an eCommerce site for shopping, you already have your product/service categories and listings, so getting them to the right category with your ad does the trick.

However, if you provide a service or sell products that require more contact with the prospect, you must have a way to get them to give you contact information. You do this in each section or category with sidebar or in-content links to special reports, more detailed product or service information, case study reports, or other offerings that will entice them to click and give you their information to get the offer via email.

Follow these three steps to success at insanely awesome conversion rates at low cost using PPC, Pay-Per-Click marketing to make your website an exit rather than just a billboard.