Maximizing Paid Search On A Tiny Budget: Advice For Small Business Owners
An effective paid search strategy is a cost-effective way for your small business to find new customers and drive growth. With all the relevant information you need to hand, you can carefully track conversion rates and use highly targeted campaigns to reach out to distinct customer niches. Unfortunately, small business owners must often do this with limited budget. If your paid search budget won't stretch very far, get the biggest return on investment with these five crucial optimization tips.
Look for coupons and partnerships
While you might expect your customers to look for coupons and special deals, these offers are also available to small businesses like yours. Paid search providers often offer deals to new and existing customers that can help a meager budget go further.
Small businesses can also benefit from paid search partners. These businesses often offer deals to small business owners that give you a certain amount of money off when you spend money on paid advertising through them in a certain period, helping you to make your budget go further.
Get selective with your keywords
Effective keywords are critical to a profitable paid search strategy. The keywords you work with will dictate how much money you make and how much you have to spend. Nonetheless, the more keywords you bid on, the more complex your strategy will become. In turn, this could cost you more money.
Start your paid search strategy with a few critical keywords. Make sure each keyword gives you a good return on investment, and quickly stop working with under-performing search terms. A few highly effective keywords will give you a far better return on investment than lots of average search terms.
Avoid ego bidding
Keyword bidding should always come down to profitability, and small business owners should only ever bid on keywords that can offer the highest return on investment. Unfortunately, some small business owners continue to bid on keywords where they rank highly because they believe this boosts their brand and market reputation.
With a small paid search budget, you cannot afford to bid on keywords that you think help your brand but don't generate an income. A top ranking for unprofitable keywords won't stop your business going bust, so make sure you stay away from these ego bids.
Investigate how time of day affects revenue-per-click
It's easy to assume that people search on certain keywords equally throughout the day, but this is often untrue. Many keywords are only profitable at certain times, and if you don't have the luxury of a massive paid search budget, you need to hunt out and optimize your strategy during those periods.
Paid search optimization tools often highlight profitable periods to marketeers. In fact, it's often worth completely suspending paid search activity at certain times. Increase your bidding during the peak periods to make every dollar of your budget bring in the biggest return on investment.
Build up a negative keyword list
Some small business owners mistakenly believe that a paid search strategy should only focus on the keywords that attract customers. In fact, negative keywords are also vital. Negative keywords are the search terms that lead customers to your page who don't want your products and services. Attracting the wrong people is a waste of your precious budget.
For example, if you offer online training and tutorials, a keyword like 'classroom training' probably wouldn't be of interest to your customers. As such, you need to set up a negative keyword list, so you can exclude these terms from your bidding strategy.
You can spot negative keywords by analyzing customer data. Look for keywords that often trigger your advert and then have a low click-through-rate. These terms are attracting page visitors who then click away. This sort of behavior indicates that your page is not what the customer wanted.
Paid search can work effectively with any budget, but you'll need to adapt your approach to get the best return on investment. Learn how to optimize your paid search strategy, and make every dollar work hard for you. For more information, work with experienced marketing services like Meredith Broadcast Digital Solutions.
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