If you're website is not ranking on the first page of Google, do you
even have a website? Listen or read on to learn the difference between Google Organic & Google Paid search!
The last few parts of our Digital Marketing Crash Course focused on Facebook.
Now it's time to talk about Google! It's the biggest search engine in the world so obviously it's a huge marketing opportunity for any business.
There’s two ways to show up on Google: organic and paid. The top four spots on Google are reserved for paid listings. Research shows over 60% of people can't tell the difference between the two. The opportunity paid listings provide is the ability to get in front of people right when they're making their purchase decision. Google paid listings have some of the highest purchase intent of any digital marketing platform. For example people searching "Wooloongabba dentist booking" are likely ready to immediately book an appointment.
The aim of the game is to list on the search terms that matter to your business.
Organic Listings
If you're looking to drive traffic organically through Google then being on the first page is crucial.
85% of clicks go to the top three listings. While you're not paying for traffic through Google listings... it takes a heap of work to get to the top! You need to carefully optimise your site architecture, backlinks, metatags and keywords. Google uses over 200 factors to determine where your website ranks and there's no guaranteed way to get to the top. It takes years to get to the top of high traffic search terms.
The other downside of organic listings is: even if you've done everything right and are ranking number 1 for a search,
people still have to scroll past four listings and a map placement to get to you. With over 60% of users being unaware that paid listings are ads this means a lot of potential customers will click on the links they immediately see. Google makes it's money through advertising so it will always prefer sites that pay.
For an example of what organic rankings look like, look at the bottom listings of the following screenshot -
Adwords
It makes sense to
put as much time into Google AdWords as your organic listings. Every now and then people will tell us they’ve tried AdWords and given up because it didn’t work for them. This is often because they made a few crucial mistakes. Business owners are likely far too busy to look through the advanced settings in AdWords. You have to dig through all the rabbit holes to make sure Google's default settings are not wasting your spend.
When building an AdWords campaign, you need to decide what you can afford to pay. Google charges per click, so by looking at a search terms CPC you know exactly how many people your budget will bring to your site. If your conversion rate and value outweighs the cost then you know your campaign is likely to be profitable. The industry average CPC is $2.20 but it varies. We have clients with a CPC of twenty cents, all the way up to $9.50!
In tandem with your Adwords campaign you should run a Facebook re-marketing campaign. If you spend hundreds of dollars bringing people to your website only a fraction of them will initially convert. This is lost money unless you use a Facebook Pixel to target web traffic and reach out again to this warm audience. Re-marketing campaigns conversion rates are much higher than cold audiences so it's well worth your time. You can read more about re-marketing in this
blog post we wrote about the subject.
For an example of what a Google AdWords paid search ad looks like, see the yellow box in the screenshot below. As mentioned, they're always at the top of the page.
Hopefully this has given you an idea on how Google organic and paid listings can help your business. In the next part we'll talk about how to go about email marketing. As always feel free to shoot us an email or comment with any questions you might have! You can also listen along to our podcast on Soundcloud:
Devote Digital Marketing Podcast.
Ron Swanson thinks you should tune in. ASAP.
