Pay Per Click

When you type something into Google, you’re presented with a list of results on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Here, you see both organic search results and paid search results.

Paid search results appear at the top of the SERP, and they feature a little green box with the word ‘Ad’. To start running Search ads and drive traffic to your website, sign up for a Google Ads account. You’ll only be charged when someone clicks on your ad and gets redirected to your site.

Within Google Ads, you can access the Google Keyword Planner, which is a tool that helps you identify the best keywords to use. When deciding what search terms you want to target, consider the following:

Whether it’s relevant to your audience

Whether it’s highly searched for

Price-wise, look at the estimated search volume for your keywords, then decide how much you’re willing to spend on each keyword. The lower the Google keyword search volume, the cheaper it should be to win an auction and show your ad at the top of the SERP. The exact prices are determined by how many other businesses are bidding on the same keywords.

Finally, Google’s Quality Score is a metric that helps you measure the quality of your ad and its relevance to the keywords you’re targeting. Quality Score is assigned as a number between 1–10 for every keyword, with the score being based on 3 main factors:

The quality of the keywords you pick

How relevant your keywords are to the ad

Your landing page user experience

This score has enormous influence over the cost and effectiveness of your paid search ads.