Yes. Yes, you almost certainly are paying too much for your keywords.

And they are likely the wrong keywords to boot.

Here’s why:

  1. The majority of your keywords are probably generic keywords for your business category.
     
  2. The people searching on those keywords aren’t familiar with your company or brand when they see your PPC ads come up in the search results.

If a prospective customer searches on a generic keyword, it’s because they don’t have a sense of who they want to fix their problem or buy from.

You are essentially introducing yourself to the client for the first time, and that’s the 2nd worst time to introduce yourself.

Ideally, you’d want them searching on your NAME instead of a generic term, such as “AC repair,” or “jewelry stores,” or the like.

But even if they don’t have instant recall and preference for your brand, they might still be familiar enough with you to prefer buying from you over others.

This is the difference between unaided recall and aided recall.

And aided recall still matters in this instance.

The more familiar your prospective customers are with your company when they see your PPC ads, and the more positively they feel about your company, the more likely they are to click on them.

Because some familiarity beats no familiarity.

No one wants to buy from a stranger if they can help it.

And this matters because the greater the Click-Through Rate (CTR) on your search ads, the higher your Quality Score and the cheaper you’ll have to bid.

Cheaper bids = lower cost per click = lower cost per lead, assuming your landing page is up to snuff.

By the way, you are directing people to a proper landing page for your search terms, aren’t you?

Because if you’re just plopping prospects on the home page instead of to a page specific to the service or product they were searching for, you are undoubtedly paying too much for the clicks while simultaneously converting fewer of those clicks to actual leads.

Not a good combo.

So that’s how you’re paying too much for the wrong keywords.

But what about the right keywords?

The right keywords are your name and branded terms or phrases.

You will always pay less for those terms.

Plus, customers who come to you from branded terms will always convert better post-click.

The trick is to get customers to think of your company first and feel about you the best when they need what you sell.

That way they search for you, specifically.

And the trick to doing that is to launch a proper mass media branding campaign.

In fact, while increased sales from such a campaign can take until the latter half of a year, increases in website traffic from branded keywords can often be seen within a matter of months.

It’s one of the earlier signs that your branding efforts are paying off.

Indeed, this isn’t just a theory.

One of my colleagues, the brilliant Cedric Yau, worked with a giant home services company that was able to track leads all the way from clicks through to paid sales.

And his data clearly showed that generic keywords had low conversions and very low profitability once sales were factored in.

While branded keywords not only had much higher clicks, conversions, and sales, they also had higher average tickets.

So they were much more profitable all the way through. In fact, here’s a sterilized chart of that data:

As you can see, the path toward profitable PPC campaigns lies in cultivating spend on branded terms.

And you do that through a long-term branding campaign.

Better yet, as your branding campaign goes on, many customers will type your URL directly into their browser, bypassing the PPC expense altogether.

And that’s how you get off the Pay-Per-Crack treadmill and onto the path of sustained growth over time.

If you’d like help with that journey, I’d be happy to be your guide.

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