The best way to direct traffic to your website is to make sure you site is optimised so you are easily found in the search engines. However, it can take time to properly optimise your site and create enough quality content to have a real effect on your search engine ranking, especially if yours is a brand new website or you are working in a competitive market. Another effective way to increase your web traffic is through PPC – Pay Per Click. If you’re not sure exactly what PPC is, do a search on Google and look out for the “sponsored” adverts at the top and bottom of the results page. These are Pay Per Click adverts, and they are displayed according to the keywords searched for, the popularity of the terms, the relevance of the advert and the amount the advertiser has bid for their ad to be displayed.

Reasons to try Pay Per Click

The main reason to try PPC is that rather than waiting for your website to rise organically to the top of the search engines, you can be visible instantly. Once you know what keywords you want to target so your potential customers can find you, you can put together your text advert and start your pay per click campaign straight away. So long as you’ve set your bidding price correctly (the price you’re prepared to pay per click on your advert) your advert will be seen as soon as anyone searches for your keyword. If your advert is compelling enough you’ll see an increase in web traffic very quickly.

Another reason to try Pay Per Click is that you can monitor the results very closely to see what works and what doesn’t. Whereas with organic SEO it’s difficult to calculate the ratio of people searching for your keywords against the number of visits you get, with Pay Per Click you can see exactly how many times your advert has been displayed and how many click throughs it resulted in. You can also run split tests – where you have two different adverts that use the same keyword – to see which is more effective. There’s no limit on the number of adverts you can have or the number of keywords you want to target either, other than as many as your budget allows.

Interested in trying PPC but don’t really know where to start? The third reason to try Pay Per Click is that you don’t have to learn how it works yourself, you can let someone else manage your PPC campaign for you. At HodgesNet we think search engine optimisation is the best long term tool for increasing your web ranking and visitor numbers, but in the short term we know that Pay Per Click can be really effective. We can research your keywords and set up your campaign for you, and then monitor it and tweak it to make sure you get the best value for money for your keywords.

If you’re interested in finding out more have a look at our PPC Campaign Management Services, or call the team on  +44(0)8432 894 402  to discuss your requirements.

Pay Per Click (PPC) has long been seen as a cost-effective way of advertising on the internet. In a PPC campaign, adverts promoting (mainly) websites are displayed on search engines, are triggered when someone searches for a specific keyword – Google, for example, currently shows PPC ads above the organic search results, and down the right hand side of the page. There is no charge for the adverts to be displayed, but advertisers pay for every click on the advert. Webmasters can also choose to display PPC ads on their websites, in exchange for part of the Pay Per Click fee.

Google announced this week  that they are going to run a test by stopping the display of Pay Per Click adverts down the side of the search results page.

After monitoring how the positioning of PPC ads affects the number of clicks they receive, Google will now display these “sponsored” adverts at the bottom of the organic search results. According to Google, “In many cases, we have found that displaying ads below search results fits better into the user’s flow as they scan the page from top to bottom. On average, this placement performed better than side ads in terms of click-through rate in our tests.”

The trouble with Pay Per Click