Here we’ll be looking at Google AdWords, Google’s own advertising service which allows you to place search results for your website on a search engine results page (SERP) by paying for them.

There’s no need to wait for your new site to work its way organically up the rankings. By using paid search you can see immediate results and it’s not nearly as difficult to use or expensive as you may think.

Paid search

Paid search is the term we use for advertising within the listings of a search engine. These normally appear at the top of a SERP or to the side, and increasingly look more and more like organic results. At the moment Google places a small yellow ‘Ad’ label on them.

Basic principles of AdWords

Basically you pick some keywords that a searcher might use on Google, then create an advert that will appear on the SERP based on those keywords.

If you want your ad to appear at all, you have to bid against other marketers on how much you’re willing to pay Google AdWords every time a searcher clicks on your ad.

Obviously the more you pay-per-click (PPC) the more likely your ad will appear in the search results.

However, and this is a big however, unlike other real-time bidding models, it’s not just the highest bid that is taken into account. Google also uses something called a ‘quality score’.