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The fact you can buy your website a great listing in the search results of Google  has never been a very closely guarded secret.

If nobody knows about it having an outstanding CPA website design isn’t going to do you very much good. There are a number of ways to showcase your website, but one of the fastest is advertising using Google Pay-Per-Click.

If you’ve ever done a search on Google, and who hasn’t, you have no doubt seen sponsored listings. They appear on the right side of the search results page, and often up to the first three positions on the left side. These websites are marketing their ads through Google Adwords pay-per-click (or PPC) platform. When Google displays an ad, that ad incurs an impression. An advertiser pays for the click when you click on one of the sponsored listings. In other words, that advertiser pays Google per each click their ad receives.

The final cost of the click that is ultimately payed to Google, is impacted by the landing page quality score. Quality score is driven by many factors, including the relevance of the content on the landing page to the search term, as well as the Click Through Rate, or “CTR”.

Click through rate is the rate of clicks to impressions. If your ad is displayed 100 times, and receives 10 clicks, then your CTR is 10%. A high click through rate signals to Google that you are showing a relevant ad for the search phrase, and this will improve your quality score for that keyword.

The higher the quality score is of the landing page, the lower the actual cost per click will be. Adwords is essentially an auction. You bid on keywords. In very simple terms, the higher your bid, the higher your website’s ad will be displayed.

Now there are a number of valuations and specific calculations Google makes to specify where your ad will be placed. These calculations occur in real time when the search is being conducted. In a future article, we will look closer at the specifics of these calculations. For this article, it is only important to know that what you bid, is not what you will pay for a click. If you bid $5.00 for a click, and your quality score is 4, you will pay more for a click then if your quality score is 8, and you will never pay more then your bid, or $5.00, for a click.

Remember Google’s first priority is to showcase relevant search results, even for the paid results. They could just give the first spot to the person who bids the most, but that would only ensure the person willing to spend the most money would be listed first. The most relevant search result however may not be the listing with the highest bid.

A very good illustration of this is your company name. Let’s say you are Adidas, and you want to bid on the keyword “Nike”. The most relevant search result for the keyword “Nike”, is obviously the Nike website. Google is going to give Nike a higher quality score for that keyword, in effect rewarding them for their relevancy for that keyword.

Before we look at tips to improving your quality score, it’s important to also understand match types. There are three match types you can and should bid on for each keyword. They are broad, phrase, and exact match types.

Exact Match: Exact match is the best keyword to bid on. An exact match means the search phrase being searched on is an exact match for the keyword for which you are bidding. For example if you are bidding on exact match for “Accounting Firms”,  your website’s ad will be displayed only when someone searches for “Accounting Firms”.

Phrase Match: Phrase match means your keyword is a phrase within the search string. For example, if you bid on a phrase match of “Accounting Firms”,  you ad will be displayed when someone searches on things like “accounting firms for small business”, or “top accounting firms”.

Broad Match: Broad match essentially let’s the search engine decide if the search phrase is a match for your broad match keyword or not. Bidding on broad match keywords is both important, and dangerous. It’s important because a broad match for “accounting firms” might be triggered when someone searches for “accounting services”. It also can be triggered when someone misspells a word, such as “acounting firms”. The danger is that Google may determine that “Accounting Supplies” is a close enough match to “Accounting Services”, and trigger your broad match keyword. This is why Google allows advertisers to declare “negative keywords”. We’ll talk more about negative keywords in a moment.

Now that you have an understanding about your website’s quality score and keyword match types, here are some tips on how you can improve your quality score and click through rates.

Ad Copy

The copy in your ad should reflect the search phrase, or keyword you are bidding on. The person doing the search will be more apt to click an ad that has their search string. For example, if you bid on “CPA Services”, you want the headline of your ad to be something like “Quality CPA Services”. If your ad title says “Jim’s Accounting Firm”, the searcher then has to stop and think… if they click your link, are they going to find what they are looking for? Their decision is often made within a split second, so you don’t want the prospect to have to stop and think. Give them exactly what they want. If that means writing 25 different ad titles for 25 different keywords, so be it. Your work will pay off in the end.

Landing Page

The page on your site that the searcher is taken to when they click your ad is called the landing page. Normally this should not be the homepage of your website. If someone searches for “Tax Preperation”, they should be taken directly to the page on your website that explains your tax preperation services rather than a generic accounting related homepage. If the ad goes to your homepage, and they have to search through a big pile of CPA related content just to find what they are looking for, they’ll probably just click the back button and go to the next advertiser.

If your website doesn’t have a suitable landing page for the keyword, add one. It really is that important.

Similar to the ad copy, you want to take as much of the decision making out of the process as possible. Make it as straight forward as possible for the searcher to find what it is they are looking for. Google will reward your quality score for having a landing page that is specific to the keyword, because it improves the search experience for people who find you through their search engine.

Negative Keywords

Knowing the keywords you don’t want to trigger your ads is just as important as knowing what keywords you do want to bid on. Phrase and broad matching make this essential. If you bid on the broad match of “accounting services”, you probably do not want your ad displayed if someone searches for “accounting supplies”, so you would want to add “supplies” as a negative keyword.

When a search phrase includes one of your negative keywords, Google will not display your ad.

Location Targeting

I’ve saved the best for last. Location targeting is extremely important, especially for firms that provide a service such as accounting or CPA services. If you provide CPA services you will want to be able to meet with your client, and more importantly the client is very likely looking for a accountant close to home. Having propsects more then 100 miles away clicking on yoru ad is going to become a big waste of money.

There are two ways to target a location. The first is to target your ads to only be displayed within a certain radius, such as 10 to 20 miles from your business location. You might bid on more general keywords, like “tax preparation”, within a very specific location.

The second way to target location is with very specific keywords in a more general area. For example, you might display your ads to anyone in California, or even the country, if they type in the specific keyword “Los Angeles CPA” or “Los Angeles Accounting”.

Keep these basic principles in mind while you’re setting up your websites with Adwords campaigns and you’ll find the learning curve a lot easier and your initial results will be a lot more profitable!