PPC Campaigns - Online Visibility

There are still thousands of companies that have little concept of the £thousands that they're losing in business through being invisible in the search engines. The first signs of such awareness are when levels of business start to decline and suddenly the penny drops that competitors are actively promoting themselves in the search engines and have been taking away potential customers for years.

There's a simple test that any company can do - think about the types of phrases that potential clients may type into Google and then start typing those phrases into Google UK (http://www.google.co.uk) and seeing what appears in the search results. The search results page may look similar to this:

The majority of businesses want to be listed on the left-hand side of Google - what's known as the 'organic', or 'natural' listings. Most people click on the links to the left and so businesses want to be listed there. That's certainly possible but it requires the skills, and quite some expense, of natural rankings experts. Custwin don't optimise websites for the natural listings because it's a deep area of expertise in itself and we prefer to focus on our strengths. We do, however, have many trusted contacts who can assist if this is a requirement.

What most businesses need is a relatively cheap way to get strong online visibility and this comes through pay per click (PPC), also known as paid advertising, and in Google, known as Google Adwords.

If you look at the screenshot above you'll see 'Sponsored Links' on the right-hand side of the screen and also in the yellow bar on the left-hand side. Those companies adverts all appear when people type particular phrases into Google and if searchers click on their adverts (which takes them through to the company websites), then the advertiser pays a fee (which can range from a few pence to pounds, depending on the type of business and level of competition). These costs per click tend to be around the 10-20p per click for most types of businesses but we can always advise without obligation on how much such clicks would cost for your type of business.

Guess how much money Google makes from the natural listings on the left-hand side? £0.00.

Compare that to the £billions that they make from the 'Sponsored Links' and you start to see that contrary to popular belief, there are huge numbers of people clicking on the Sponsored Links adverts. This is (unofficially) exactly what Google wants to happen so you start to understand why they're not going to make it particularly easy to get a good position in the natural listings. Custwin clients alone spend over £1M a year on Google advertising between them all.

In a nutshell, any company that's not highly visible in the search engines, and particularly in Google, is on a downhill decline because so many potential buyers nowadays automatically turn to the search engines when looking for products and services.

So, can any company set up an advertising campaign in such a way? The good news is YES, the bad news is that it's not quite that simple. Read on to see why.