Quality is in the Content Google Adwords is a useful, effective and cost efficient marketing tool to have in your quiver, but it requires some work ahead of time to make sure you are getting everything you can out of your campaign. Here are some items you should consider before launch: 1. Make sure you are considering your search engine optimization techniques on your site before you create your campaign. Google will look to your site, as well as your ad, to deduce the relevancy of the information during a user’s search. You want to make sure you have optimized the keywords on your site. This includes meta tags, alt tags on pictures, and make sure you have properly utilized the

, tags on your page (we’ll talk more about this on a future post). 2. Use the built-in keyword tool in the Adwords editor to help you choose keywords and keyword phrases. Keyword phrases will help you target your audience since it puts the word in context. For example, if you’ve seen the Bing commercials, keywords alone can drop you in a search having nothing to do with your business. “Did you get the tickets for Hawaii?” “Tickets: How to beat a traffic ticket.” Keyword phrases like, “airline tickets for Hawaii” in the search and on your campaign (if you were selling tickets to Hawaii) would have yielded much better search results. 3. Create ad copy for each keyword phrase, and create a link with your keyword phrase embedded. For example, let’s say you have a used car lot. You may want to choose the keyword phrase, “Buying a Used Car” and place it in your Google Adword Campaign. Then, you may craft your ad copy as follows: Buying a Used Car Contact Our Experts When Buying a Used Car www.usedcars.com/buying_a_used_car 4. Make sure you optimize your ad copy with calls to action, and test ads to ensure you are using the most effective campaigns. 5. Experiment with Exact Match or Keyword Phrase Match to see which setting is most effective for your campaign. 6. Don’t just choose keywords showing the highest traffic volume, you will most likely have a broad term (like, cars) which only casual searchers or researchers are using; not purchasing. Select transaction based keyword phrases (like, buying cars). 7. Negative keywords should be thought about and used in your campaign. You don’t want to pay for clicks from audiences not interested in your product. For example, while looking for an online booking engine, the same ad kept coming up for me, “Quality Used Engines.” It was comical, but not so much for the business owner who had to pay for this faux pas. 8. Geotargeting – if you are a local proprietor, you may want to ensure users finding your ad are in the local area. It makes little sense for a bakery in Long Island to advertise to a bride in Fairbanks, Alaska. You have the ability in Google Adwords to target by city(ies), or by a radius in a map. This is a great feature and helps you target your audience even further down. Remember, the name of the game is: Conversion. You not only want to get traffic to your site, but you want to get customers to your site. A well crafted Google Adword campaign will help get you there.