The Com Daily

The fact you can buy your website a top listing in the search results of Google  has never been a very well kept secret.

If nobody finds out about it having a fist rate CPA website design isn’t going to help you sell your firm very well. There are lot’s of ways to showcase your website, but one of the best is advertising using Google.

When you have used Google to perform a search, you have probably seen the sponsored listings. They are displayed on the right side of the search results page, and often up to the first three listings on the left side. These websites are using “pay-per-click” marketing through Google’s Adwords. An impression is incurred when Google displays the ad. When you click a sponsored listing you are taken to the advertisers website and that advertiser will incur a charge from Google. In other words, that advertiser pays Google per each click their ad receives.

The cost of the click that is payed to Google it ultimately impacted by the landing page quality score. Quality score is dictated by many factors, including the relevance of the page content to the search term, and the Click Through Rate, or “CTR”.

Click through rate is the rate of clicks to impressions. If your ad has 200 impressions, and receives 100 clicks, then your CTR is 50%. A high click through rate signals to Google that you are showing a relevant ad for the search phrase. This will improve the quality score for that keyword.

The higher the quality score is of the landing page, the lower the actual cost per click will be. Adwords is essentially an auction. You bid on keywords. In very straight forward terms, the higher your bid, the higher your website’s ad will be displayed.

Now there are a number of valuations and specific calculations Google makes to determine where your ad will be placed. These calculations happen in real time when a search is performed. We’ll explain the specifics of these calculations in a future article. For now, it is only important to understand that what you bid, is not what you will pay for a click. If your quality score is 7 and you bid $5.00 for a click, you will pay less for a click then if your quality score is 4, and you will never pay more then your bid, or $5.00, for a click.

Remember Google’s 1st priority is to showcase relevant search results, even for the paid results. They could just give the first spot to the person who bids the most, but that would only ensure the advertiser willing to spend the most money would be listed first. The most relevant search result however may not be ad with the highest bid.

The best illustration of this is your company name. Let’s say you are Adidas, and you want to bid on the keyword “Nike”. The most relevant search result for the keyword “Nike”, is obviously the Nike website. Google is going to give Nike a higher quality score for that keyword, in effect rewarding them for their relevancy for that keyword.

Before we look at tips to improving your quality score, it’s important to also understand match types. There are three match types you can and should bid on for each keyword. They are broad, phrase, and exact match types.

Exact Match: Exact match is the best keyword to bid on. An exact match means the search phrase being searched on is an exact match for the keyword for which you are bidding. For example if you are bidding on exact match for “Accounting Firms”,  your website’s ad will be displayed only when someone searches for “Accounting Firms”.

Phrase Match: Phrase match means your keyword is a phrase within the search string. For example, if you bid on a phrase match of “Accounting Firms”,  you ad will be displayed when someone searches on things like “small accounting firms”, or “accounting firms and CPAs”.

Broad Match: Broad match essentially let’s the search engine determine if the search phrase is a match for your broad match keyword or not. Bidding on broad match keywords is both imperative, and dangerous. It’s important because a broad match for “accounting firms” might be triggered when someone searches for “accounting services”. It also can be triggered when someone misspells a word, such as “acounting firms”. The danger is that Google may decide that “Accounting Supplies” is a close enough match to “Accounting Services”, and trigger your broad match keyword. This is why Google allows advertisers to declare “negative keywords”. We’ll talk more about negative keywords in a moment.

Now that you have an understanding about your keyword match types and website’s quality score, here are some tips on how you can improve your quality score and click through rates.

Ad Copy

Your ad copy should reflect the search phrase, or keyword you are bidding on. The person doing the search will be more apt to click an ad that has their search string. For example, if you bid on “CPA Services”, you want the headline of your ad to be something like “Quality CPA Services”. If your ad title says “Bob’s Financial Consulting”, the person doing the search then has to stop and think… if they click your link, are they going to find what they are looking for? Their decision is often made within a split second, so you don’t want the prospect to have to stop and think. Give them exactly what they want. If that means writing 50 different ad titles for 50 different keywords, so be it. Your work will pay off in the end.

Landing Page

The page on your site that the searcher is taken to when they click your ad is called the landing page. Normally this should not be your website’s homepage. If someone searches for “Tax Preperation”, they should be taken directly to the page on your website that explains your tax preperation services rather than a generic accounting related homepage. If the ad goes to your homepage, and they have to search through a big pile of CPA related content just to find what they are searching for, they’ll probably just click the back button and go to the next advertiser.

If your website doesn’t have a suitable landing page for the keyword, add one. It really is that important.

Just like the ad copy, you want to remove as much of the decision making out the process as possible. Make it as straight forward as possible for the searcher to find what it is they are looking for. Google will reward your quality score for having a landing page that is specific to the keyword, because it improves the search experience for people who find you through their search engine.

Negative Keywords

Just as important as knowing what keywords to bid on, is targeting what keywords you don’t want to trigger your ads. This is very imperative because of phrase and broad matching. If you bid on “accounting services” as a broad match, you probably do not want your ad displayed if someone searches for “accounting supplies”, so you would want to add “supplies” as a negative keyword.

When a search phrase contains one of your negative keywords, Google will not display your ad.

Location Targeting

I’ve saved the best for last. For firms that provide services like accounting or CPA service, location targeting is extremely important. If you provide CPA services you will want to be able to meet with your client, and more importantly the client is very likely looking for a accountant close to home. Having prospects 100 miles away clicking on your ad is going to become a huge waste of money.

There are two ways to target a location. The first is to target your ads to only be displayed within a certain radius, such as 10 to 20 miles from your business location. You might bid on more general keywords, like “tax preparation”, within a very specific location.

The second way to target location is with very specific keywords in a more general area. For example, you might display your ads to anyone in Florida, or even the country, if they type in the specific keyword “Miami CPA” or “Tampa Accounting”.

Keep these basic principles in mind while you’re setting up your websites with Adwords campaigns and you’ll find the learning curve a lot easier and your initial results will be a lot more profitable!