Google Ads is undoubtedly a useful tool for companies of all sizes. However, there are a few things to consider before launching your first campaign. 

You may increase the efficiency of your Google Ads campaigns, prevent resource waste, and simply turn a profit by paying attention to these 8 factors first.

1. Learn The Basics 

Without any prior knowledge of Google Ads and concepts like campaigns, ad groups, keywords, bids, and budgets, you may find it fairly overwhelming to create your first campaign.

You must understand the various ad types and when to employ them before putting up your campaigns and advertisements. The following phase is to comprehend campaign structures and learn how to develop effective campaign structures.

2. Establish Campaign Objectives

Before starting your Google Ads campaign, it is important to lay out what your objectives are. Are you seeking more sales? More site visits? Email subscriptions? Whatever your objectives are, it is important to lay out measurable goals.

One popular model for setting goals is the SMART approach:

Specific – what outcomes do you need to see to consider the goal accomplished?

Measurable – how will you decide whether the goal is completed or not?

Attainable – how likely is it that you can accomplish this goal?

Relevant – does your goal align with your company mission and purpose?

Time-Bound – when will this goal be accomplished? Set a deadline

Setting SMART goals ensures that your objectives actually get completed in a timely and realistic manner. It’s easy to say “I want more sales!” but how do you get there? What exactly is needed to get there? SMART goals allow you to get granular and break down an objective into a series of actionable steps. 

3. Know Your Audience

You must understand your market and target audience before you even start to set up your Google Advertising account and create ads.

The following three considerations are key when trying to understand your audience:

Understand the Market

• Businesses don’t operate in a vacuum or separately from their customers, so finding out what their problems are will help you create effective marketing campaigns. Pay close attention to the market issue and the wants of potential clients or customers.

Identify the Product-Market Fit

• Knowing how your products or services meet the wants of your customers and how you’re distinct from your competitors is important. Are you meeting market demand? Do you have a firm understanding of your industry and competitors? 

Correct Your Messaging

• Your advertising messaging should align with your audience’s demands and your company’s objectives. Additionally, ensure that your ad messaging is aligned with your campaign objectives.

4. Understand Audience Targeting

You can decide whether your advertisements appear to all audiences or just a select group of people. For simpler audience targeting, you can break your audience into different groups or segments. These groupings or segments are based on particular demographics, interests, or custom segments.

You can add your own segments or select from pre-existing segments when publishing a campaign. You may also develop segments depending on how customers respond to your advertisements and brand using remarketing lists.

Make sure to look at what the various segments are for each type of ad.

5. Identify The Right Keywords for Your Ads

The different levels of ‘keyword match’ indicates how closely a keyword must match the user’s search term for the advertisement to be eligible for an auction.

There are three main keyword match types, each of which offers a unique audience targeting option. While exact match enables you to connect with users at the bottom of the funnel or with particular user intents, broad match enables you to reach larger audiences and search intents.

Your keywords should be as relevant as possible to the advertisement and landing page they drive traffic to. If you need inspiration, look at your competitor’s website and their advertisements .. Consider the search terms your ideal client would use to find the items or services you offer.

6. Optimize Your Landing Page

When a user clicks on your advertisement, they “land” on your landing page. Your landing page needs to be optimized if you want to enhance user experience and therefore, boost conversions.

Make sure your landing page is suitable to the advertisement that brought users to it and that users can easily browse it. Google rewards landing pages that are extremely relevant. Site relevancy is determined by a number of elements, such as the page’s navigational simplicity and the presence of your keywords.

A clear call to action is another crucial component of a successful landing page. If your aim is to fill out a particular number of forms, and you indicate this in your advertisement but it isn’t present on your landing page, this constitutes a poor user experience, and Google may give your landing page a low ranking.

7. Setup Proper Conversion Tracking

Google defines a conversion as, “an action that’s counted when someone engages with your ad or free product listing.”

It’s unlikely that you’ll generate a lot of sales on Google Ads as a new company without first building trust. Before a prospective consumer is willing to trust you enough to make a purchase, you must invest some time in establishing and maintaining a connection with them. By offering you the opportunity to select from a variety of objectives, including generating sales, registrations, email sign-ups, lead generation, and more, Google makes this simple. Here is a complete and easy guide on how to set up Google Ads conversion tracking.

Why is tracking conversions essential?

• Conversion monitoring is a great way to test what’s working and what isn’t in your marketing campaigns.
• They help you determine whether advertising, keywords, and landing pages are effective or ineffective.
• Ensure that you are getting a solid return on your advertising dollars and generating conversions, not just impressions.
• Allow you to experiment to better understand your target audience’s behavior and what your business needs to do to engage with them more.

8. Have Clear Account Structure

Even once you grasp the concept of product-market fit and master the fundamentals of Google Ads, the interface may appear to be a little challenging to use. This work is a little bit easier with a sorted account structure.

You have more control over your advertising’ appearance and trigger times and locations when you categorize them. Think of it as a neatly organized cabinet where you can always find what you need since everything has a place.

The following two factors are crucial to your account structure:

Naming

• I was one of many marketers who dubbed my first campaign “CA without a goal guideline” since I didn’t know any better. Many marketers who start out designing campaigns and advertising, including myself, come up with campaign titles out of thin air. As we begin to create campaigns, random names could make sense, but as we continue to add campaigns, maintaining the account gets confusing.
• In the future, it will be challenging to go in and hunt for specific campaigns and ad groups if you don’t have a consistent and understandable naming approach/convention.
• A good naming convention enables improved management, organization, and data filtering. Additionally, a clear naming convention is helpful if you have a new team member who needs to get used to the account.

Understand Your Account Split

• It is simpler to track your progress and find successful techniques when you have a clear account split and separate distinct campaign kinds. Campaigns can be divided based on bidding tactics, keyword varieties, languages, budget, etc.
• Once more, there isn’t just one ideal strategy to divide your campaigns. Your business and campaign goals will determine whether you want to run several campaigns for audiences in various markets and at various points in the purchase cycle.

Your audience wants answers to their questions fast. It is safe to assume that most of your audience  uses Google as their preferred search engine. How often have you heard someone remark, “just Google it.” Consider yourself as a researcher, how often did you scroll to the next page on Google? Maybe once or twice, maybe never. 

It comes with no doubt that ranking on the first page of Google gives you the opportunity to increase visitors to your website  and reach an enormous audience.

So, how do you rank on the first page of Google to reap these benefits? Read below for 9 best practices to start using today  if you want your website to appear on Google’s first page of search results.

1. Reach On-Page SEO Success

Because search engines analyze on-page SEO to understand what your page is truly about and which search terms your website is appropriate for, it is an essential element of your entire SEO strategy. You won’t even start to rank for your target keywords if your on-page SEO is lacking.

Here are some on-page SEO factors to consider:

• Title
• Meta description
• Headings
• Alt-Text
• URL Structure
• Website secure connection
• Page Loading Speed
• Internal Links
• Keyword Density

2. Complete Keyword Research & Start Targeting Long-tail Keywords

The particular words and phrases placed into the search window to  discover relevant pages are known as keywords.

To help you rank for those terms and show up higher on Google’s results pages, you should include keywords on all of your website pages, titles, blogs, and even social media postings. You shouldn’t  pack a page with a bunch of random phrases. It is also good practice  to limit your keyword concentration to 1-3 per post.

Long-tail keywords are more specific, so  they receive less search traffic, however, they have a high conversion rate. They enable you to steadily increase site visitors over the long-term.

Here’s an example to show you what we mean:.

• Short-tail Keyword (Head Keyword): SEO
• Long-tail keyword: SEO beginners guide for small businesses

In short, they are more specific, less competitive, and more purposeful. Additionally, they include short-tail keywords. So, we’re hitting two targets with one arrow. You will quickly rank for short-tail keywords once you begin to rank for those long-tail keywords.

3. Create Content That Is Simple to Understand

If you are a little bit aware of SEO, you might only hear about having good content, quality content, and digestible content. You must concentrate on creating new content while also auditing your present content. 

Duplicate content is one SEO ranking element to be aware of. For SEO, unique content is always best. If you want to boost the ranking to your landing page and homepage, you must have constant content. Creating quality content  helps you build backlinks and increases your chances of ranking higher on Google which increases with the number of high-quality backlinks you have. 

After developing this valuable material, publish it to your website’s landing page, blog pages, and social media sites like LinkedIn articles, Facebook brand page, Facebook groups, Quora, or even Reddit. 

Google does not crawl the content from info-graphics, but it is still a good idea to publish articles with eye-catching visuals that are excellent for reaching audiences who prefer to browse visual content. It is also important to ensure all your visual content contains alt-text as Google crawls images and ranks sites higher with plenty of alt-text.

4. Build Reliable Backlinks

It’s 2022. Speaking of backlinks, Do the backlinks still matter when it comes to Google rankings in 2022??

Backlinks were found to be significantly connected with better Google ranks in a recent SEMrush analysis. Search engines use backlinks as important recommendations from other websites to determine the trustworthiness and use of your content.  Therefore, the more of these “votes” you manage, the higher Google and other search engines will rank your website.

For your website to rank higher and appear on Google’s firstront page, you must develop high-quality backlinks. The best course of action is to engage in a link exchange or guest post on other trusted websites. This can appear in many different content formats such as infographics, WHY posts, and WHAT posts also have a good possibility of getting more links.Another strategy is You can reply to questions on quora to get quality good backlinks. 

5. Ensure High User Experience

Considering these practices and Google’s algorithm is important, but don’t forget to focus on your audience as well. It should be easy and clear for your audience to navigate your website and all of its pages. For example, if you have an e-commerce website, you will want to make sure that the purchase process is easy to use. If it takes too many clicks for your user to find and purchase a product from your store, they may abandon it all together

You might be wondering how SEO would be related to this. 

• Search engines can more easily understand websites that are simple to navigate. Additionally, when search engines recognize the navigation of your website, they are more likely to show it to qualified end customers looking for your keyword phrases.
• If you concentrate on designing a website journey and customer experience that encourages users to return for more,  that will improve the rankings and authority of your website with Google.

6. Optimize Your Website for Mobile

More than half (58.99%) of the global population uses their phone to browse the internet. Google always uses mobile-first to index, and rank websites. The mobile version of your website is examined first for readability, loading speed, user experience, and design. After that, the desktop version is scanned.

Below are some tips to make your website mobile user friendly.

• Make sure it loads quickly
• Always prioritize  mobile responsive design
• Use a visible and strong font
• Showcase your CTAs (buttons) in the clearest way possible
• It would be a major missed opportunity and potentially detrimental to your website’s traffic numbers if you ignore the mobile-user, so always make sure you’re thinking of mobile optimization when designing your website.

7. Create  a Google My Business Account

Register your business with Google My Business, and it will appear on search results for location-specific queries once the business has been verified by Google.

Customers will be able to post reviews, which will tell Google how well-respected your business is. Google will therefore recommend your company more frequently, which will strengthen the position of your website. You can also create posts, update your customers, and upload videos with Google My Business which makes it even easier for people to do business with you.

8. Build Reliable Backlinks

Speaking of backlinks, do they still matter when it comes to Google rankings in 2022?

Backlinks were found to be significantly connected with better Google ranks in a recent SEMrush analysis. Search engines use backlinks as important recommendations from other websites to determine the trustworthiness and use of your content.  Therefore, the more of these “votes” you manage, the higher Google and other search engines will rank your website.

For your website to rank higher and appear on Google’s first page, you must develop high-quality backlinks. The best course of action is to engage in a link exchange or guest post on other trusted websites. This can appear in many different content formats such as info-graphics, WHY posts, and WHAT posts also have a good possibility of getting more links.Another strategy is  replying to questions on Quora to get quality backlinks. 

9. Regular Check-in

It’s hard to rank websites on Google’s first page. It requires time, experience, and strategy. SEO is a long-term practice for your business and the more of it you do and the longer you do it for, the more results you will see from it. 

Continue to check in on your content and website frequently and adjust your SEO strategy as required. It is also important to keep your eye on Google updates and their algorithm changes to stay current with best practices. 

How many pages from your website appear on the front page of Google? What actions did you already take to rank them? Which strategies actually worked for your business? We’d love to hear from you! Comment and let us know how you were successful. 

Want to start with a professional audit of your website before implementing any of the above mentioned practices? Send us a message to request a FREE site audit from one of our talented SEO specialists.