How to Get Started With Paid Search [Free Guide]

How do you even do a Google AdWords campaign? The following is an excerpt from the ebook How to Use Google AdWords,just one of the resources included in The Ultimate Free Google AdWords PPC Kit we created with our friends at SEMrush. How to Use Paid Search All too often, companies -- small businesses especially -- think that if they just pay to be on a search engine, they don't have to invest time and resources in search engine optimization to rank higher organically. You could also have the ad go to two different landing pages that are for the same offer. Finding New Keywords In addition to landing page testing, you can also use paid search to find new keywords for your campaign. The keywords that don't say "Added" next to them are not currently included in the account. Take, for instance, the keyword "search engine optimization tutorial'" from the list above. You should use the information in these Search Terms reports, and also in Google AdWords' Keyword Planner, to discover new keywords that will help you further optimize all of your SEM campaigns. You'll see that there's an organic search listing for HubSpot that ranks second on the page (just after Wikipedia), but we're also buying the keyword "inbound marketing," which displays our paid search ad for it. This widespread coverage on the search engine results page for "inbound marketing" helps to establish HubSpot as an authoritative figure for inbound marketing, and drives more traffic to our pages.

Author: Kate Taylor Mighty / Source: hubspot.com

In 2016, 96% of Google’s revenue came from paid search (or pay-per-click) advertising. Clearly, marketers are taking advantage of AdWords, but what does a great PPC campaign even look like? How do you ensure it drives ROI for your company? How do you even do a Google AdWords campaign?

To help you get started the right way, we’re breaking down the basics of how to use paid search below.

The following is an excerpt from the ebook How to Use Google AdWords,just one of the resources included in The Ultimate Free Google AdWords PPC Kit we created with our friends at SEMrush. The kit includes the full ebook, a template, and a checklist — everything you need to manage keywords, campaigns and ad groups successfully. If you’d like to access the full kit, click here.

How to Use Paid Search

All too often, companies — small businesses especially — think that if they just pay to be on a search engine, they don’t have to invest time and resources in search engine optimization to rank higher organically.

It’s important to make clear that paid search is not a replacement for anything, but should instead be used to complement other inbound marketing strategies. Paid online advertising takes a lot of time and effort, a lot of resources, and a lot of management, and it’s something you really need to invest in.

Let’s take a look at some of the useful things you can do with paid search.

Landing Page Testing

One great way to use paid search is for testing and optimizing your landing pages. So, for instance, here’s the search engine results page for “cat food for older cats”, and you see some paid results for this specific search query:

You can take that one ad and actually set it to go to two different destination URLs, and therefore, to two different landing pages.

So for a cat food ad, you could have one ad going to a page with one offer (a guide on feeding techniques for your older cat), and the other to a page for another offer (an actual product page for cat food).

You could also have the ad go to two different landing pages that are for the same offer. For example, if you wanted to test a feature of your forms, you could have two versions of the same landing page, each with a different form layout, and send the ad to each of those. This is called A/B testing, a very important and highly recommended practice for optimizing your landing pages.

Paid search is a great way to do landing page A/B testing because it allows you to direct traffic to your choice of pages, split this traffic to different pages, and ultimately find the pages that convert at the highest rate.