6 Benefits of Paid Search for your Small Business

Pay per click advertising is a great form of paid advertising that gives your small business exposure on the web around the clock. Pay per click levels the playing field by giving your business the ability to compete with larger organizations and providing you with an opportunity to purchase keywords that you may not rank for organically. It is important that you maintain a healthy balance when it comes to PPC.


Unlike traditional marketing like postcard mailers where you have to wait weeks before you start to see results, PPC provides you with instant gratification. If you start a campaign today you will potentially see results today. The challenge with PPC is 75% of educated people click on the organic search listings, so it is important that you are working on optimizing your website and its content so that you place organically in the search engine results. With a fully optimized website you are capturing organic (free) traffic and it is the gift that keeps on giving. PPC has its place in your marketing plan and is a great source of leads since 25% of searchers click on pay per click advertisements.

Here are the benefits of PPC for your service business:

1. Capture a captive audience: PPC is a good way to capture a targeted visitor. You have the ability to control the keywords that trigger your advertisement appearing in the search engine results page. You also have the ability to construct a list of negative keywords that provide you the ability to prevent your ad from showing up.

2. Local Exposure: PPC engines like Google Adwords give you the ability to geotarget potential customers in your defined coverage area, so if you are a Boston heating contractor and want to generate leads from folks in Boston you will. You will not receive clicks from folks searching for heating contractors in Wisconsin.

3. National Visibility: If you are looking to attract a national audience and have the budget to do so you will be able to generate leads from folks thousands of miles away from your business.

4. Small initial investment – PPC engines like Google Adwords provide you with an opportunity to get started with a budget that works for your business. You can set daily limits or establish a budget that is spread over the course of the month. You will have control over the knobs and levers you push and pull to increase or decrease the flow of interested prospects.

5. Testing – PPC is a great way to gauge the interest and flow of traffic for a specific set of keywords or for a new product or service. If you find that a certain keyword is pulling in a satisfactory flow of traffic you can prioritize which content you would like to develop so you can start to rank for the keywords organically.

6. Measurable Results – PPC engines like Google Adwords provide you with the tracking tools that give you visibility into which campaigns resulted in a click to your ad. They also provide you with tracking tokens that you can embed on a form submission page that supply you with the measurement of clicks to leads.