Online advertising, are you wasting your money?

Posted on by Keith Marlow

The idea for this post came out after encountering two clients within 24 hours who were both spending thousands a month on online advertising and coming to the realisation that it was doing little if anything to contribute to their businesses.

The Quality of your site matters!

Something most people do not realise is that if you use a service like AdWords, the actual ‘quality’ of your site (in relation to the keywords used) determines your final score and hence where you end up in the final list of ads. The net effect of this often means if you have a ‘low quality’ website you will often show up below those with good quality websites and miss out on the quality referrals that come with that.

The other effect, which not really that well known, is that by NOT winning out in such bids, your money is spent winning out in bids for other less competitive search terms. In essence if you are not careful in setting up AdWords you end up spending your money on search terms or phrases with an inherient lower rate of conversion… Which is great for Google, not so good for you.

So it is quite easy to be spending thousands a month on AdWords and be getting absolutely nowhere…

The other problem with a low quality website is what it says to someone who visits it – does it actually present your business in a good light, or is it actually a road block to you getting business?

What can you do?

First off, its essential that you have a website which not only looks good to people who visit it BUT also looks good to Google when it indexes it. This often means:

  • Having more than 10 pages to your site, certainly not 3!
  • Each of those pages actually have proper content on them and not just loads of images, Google likes content it can read.
  • Having someone (like us) who knows how to do SEO set up your site properly.
  • Doing something new on your website at least once a week, to keep Google interested in your site.

The above sounds simple, but you need to get it just right. Then when you do use services like AdWords you stand a much better chance of getting a real return on your investment.

If you would like us to help get you out of a sticky online advertising mess – please get in touch .