Minneapolis PPC for Contractors + Home Services

SEO is still one of the best investments you can make in growing your business, but the use of PPC in tandem with a strong SEO strategy is almost unbeatable. If you have keywords where you don’t currently rank well organically, or if your category has low-search volume and needs to bring in users searching for adjacent keywords – PPC is an absolute necessity.

Driving users to your site through Google AdWords & Bing Ads creates a similar experience to organic search, users feel no less inclined to turn into customers simply because they clicked through an ad. They have demonstrated an intent to engage with a business like yours, using PPC means you can kickstart that engagement.

Citation for CPCs and other AdWords benchmarks by industry

Google Adwords – Industry Benchmarks – WordStream

AdWords can be an expensive channel, especially in categories like law or construction – so you need a well-constructed approach. There is more than just an average CPC (Cost per click) to consider – you need to identify your website conversion rate, your target CPA (Cost per acquisition) and determine the CPC you can accept to make it all run. This is the simplest way to state it, but it’s anything but easy to perfect to make it work you need:

• A well-researched set of starting keywords
• An appropriate match-type strategy and bidding protocol
• Bid position testing – test the right position to grab clicks and conversions
• Utilize the search-terms report to identify new long-tail keywords and negative search terms to increase efficiency

Sound easy? It’s a time-consuming process. You can use averages as a starting point to determine the cost of traffic for your industry, but from there it can get complicated quick!

Depending on who you ask, SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is either a synonym for PPC/Paid Search, or is an over-arching term for any marketing done in search engines – organic or paid. Beyond that, PPC/Paid Search/SEM can all be used interchangeably – they all typically refer to using paid ads in a search engine. SEO is all about generating traffic organically, using a combination of Content & Technical SEO tactics to increase your SERP ranking.

Excellent question! Utilizing both is an ideal scenario, as you are reaching two totally different audiences. Bing searchers typically stick to Bing, as do Googlers – so utilizing both ad channels is the best way to reach your entire audience. The synopsis of both channels is as follows:

Google: Contains the vast majority of search volume, highly competitive (more search volume, but higher CPCs) and highly relevant traffic. Tends to skew younger, more tech-savvy. Has a broader range of tools to provide advertisers.

Bing Ads: Runner-up in the world of search engines, skews slightly older – primarily utilized by Windows users who are comfortable with the default experience or utilize the built in Windows 10 search bar (powered by Bing). Volume is much lower in Bing, but traffic is more cost-effective.

AdWords allows us to serve display, or text, ads on a huge variety of websites – these sites opt-in to the AdSense network and allow us to show ads for prospecting (interest, demographic, topic, affinity audiences, etc) purposes or retargeting (previous visitors to your website). Google has given us a really great tool for creating awareness & although it has a much lower conversion rate than search advertising – it can be an effective tool.

It’s complex, and is something of a black-box in terms of how properties are valued, but the simple answer is that the historical performance of your ads, the relevance of your ad to the keyword being searched, the quality of your landing page, and your bid are matched in an auction against other businesses. If you are winning in the categories outside of bid you are given a significant advantage, and will have what is called a higher Quality Score, this means you will need to bid less to earn the same position. You will pay the lowest possible amount per click to attain the position above the next business in line.

Ex. If all factors are equal, but you bid $1 and a competitor bids $.75, you will pay $.76.