If you get any of your customers, clients, sales, or donations from your website, you already know how important your search rankings are. Organic SEO is important to any marketing strategy; over 70% of web traffic comes through organic search. Businesses and nonprofits that can create authoritative, informative, high quality content on a regular basis are likely to do well in organic search and may never need to explore paid options. Most businesses and organizations find a combination of organic and paid search to be most effective: 65% of small businesses use paid search campaigns. Whether you should be doing paid search depends on several factors:
- The content of your landing page(s). What are you trying to achieve with your campaign anddo your landing pages reflect that goal? Paid search doesn’t always make sense when its purpose is to introduce your organization or raise awareness. Without a clear cut conversion on a landing page, it’s difficult to gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns. The best landing pages for paid search have a lead magnet, a product or service for sale, or a place to make donations. Paid search can be especially effective if you have an e-commerce store because even people who don’t generally click on promoted results will do so if they see a picture of something they’re already looking to buy.
- Your organic results. Organic search is a long game; it can take months to see results. Still, no one can afford to skip it. Organic search dominates the search landscape and is absolutely more valuable than paid search to your overall long term marketing strategy. If you’ve been in the game a long time and you aren’t getting anywhere, you may want to rethink your content strategy altogether and/or add paid search to give yourself a quick boost in traffic. Another great time to add paid search is if you are already somewhat competitive and you need to get above the fold (for example, you rank on page one but you are at the bottom of the page). I always recommend starting with organic search because you learn so much about your keywords and your competition before putting a lot of money into paid campaigns. If you need to learn as you go, it’s better to do so before spending a lot of money.
- Budget.
NB: You can get a google ads grant covering $10,000 per month in paid ads if you’re a nonprofit. To qualify in the US, you have to be a 501(c)(3) organization and have a strong website with good structure and informative content. To learn more about Google Ad grants, click here.
People often say that you can do paid search for any budget, and that’s true enough. But you can’t do effective paid search for any budget. You can set your own daily limits, but it takes real money to make a difference with high and medium volume keywords. A commonly cited range is $3,600-$120,000 per year for small businesses. To me, that range is too broad to be helpful, as are all averages that take the entire paid search industry into account. According to Semrush (click here for source article), in 2020, Amazon spent over $470 million on search. If you average that with your local mechanic who spent $500 a month, you aren’t getting data that helps you in any way. The cost of keywords also varies dramatically depending on industry. According to wordstream (click here for source article), the most popular keywords for insurance agents, lawyers, and banks are all over $40 per click. The word “donate” also comes in at over $40. For high volume words like these, you must consider the cost versus the benefit. Everyone who clicks isn’t going to convert. If you set a budget of $400 per day, up to ten people will visit your landing page. Will they spend or donate $400 so you can break even? Obviously, if you’re just starting out, you probably won’t be chasing after these high volume keywords. There are plenty of words that come in at $2 or $3. Some even come in under $1, but have too low a volume to matter. Good keyword research is critical to your success, which brings me to… - Time commitment. In order to run paid search campaigns effectively, you have to learn a lot upfront and pay attention to results as you go, which is another reason I generally recommend starting off learning about organic SEO. People often think of paid search as something you can buy and then not think about. In reality, there’s a lot to do, especially if you don’t want to waste money. First and foremost, you need to put in real effort on keyword research and finding words and phrases with the right balance of high enough volume and low enough cost to make the campaign worth your while. You also need to put effort into the quality of your landing pages. Google cares as much about the value of the content you’re serving as it does about your bid. They only get paid when people actually click, so they have no interest in serving up content that isn’t relevant. It is not uncommon for a lower bid with a better and more relevant landing page to win a word or phrase. Additionally, you need to make your ad copy as compelling as possible to attract clicks once it’s in a favorable position on the SERP (search engine results page). Finally, you need monitor the progress of every campaign and refine your tactics so you aren’t wasting time, effort, and money on campaigns that aren’t working. Be realistic about how much time you have to devote to managing your paid search efforts.
Substance and Style 