Tag Archives: online-marketing

Best Website Builder for Small Businesses

Posted on January 17, 2019 by Hosting

The post Best Website Builder for Small Businesses appeared first on HostGator Blog . Small business owners have a lot to deal with. No matter the day, you can pretty much count on an overwhelming to-do list. When it comes to building and maintaining a website for your small business, it’s hard to know how to fit it all in. You know you need one—no small business can get by these days without a website. But how are you supposed to find the time to get it done, or the budget to hire someone to do it? It doesn’t have to take as long as you may think. Small business owners can get a website ready and online with little effort by choosing a website builder . Why Small Businesses Should Use a Website Builder For small businesses with limited time and budget, a website builder is the best choice to start enjoying the benefits a website brings. There are a few solid reasons to go with a website builder: It’s fast. If you don’t have a website up yet, then you should prioritize getting one up fast. A small business website makes it easier for people to find you and gives you legitimacy in the eyes of potential customers. The longer you wait, the more business you’ll lose. With a good website builder, you can potentially have your website ready in a matter of days, or even hours. It’s easy.  You don’t have to learn to code or spend time training on how to use complicated software. The right website builder will be intuitive enough that you can figure it out as you go. And in addition to making the initial website creation process easier, a website builder makes ongoing maintenance easy as well. When you need to make updates to your site (and you will), each little tweak will be quick and easy. It’s affordable. While a good website builder will cost you money, the cost is much less than what you would spend on hiring a professional website designer to build a website. And you won’t have to worry about hiring someone to help you make changes down the line because you don’t know how. It’s effective. The best website builders supply a large number of templates that are designed to meet website best practices. That makes it easy for you to build a website that adheres to the general advice on what works well on the web, without having to learn it all yourself. And even with starting from a template, you can make all the changes you need to make sure your website is uniquely yours and does a good job of selling your business to your visitors. Once you’ve decided that a website builder is the right choice for you, it’s time to find the best website builder for your business needs .   What to Look for in a Small Business Website Builder With quite a few website builders on the market, you have to figure out which ones provide the features and functionality you need. Many options make it hard to move your website to a new builder once you’ve created it, so it’s important to make the right choice early on. For a small business website, there are a few main features you should look for in your website builder.   Many Templates Part of what makes website builders so easy to use is that you start with a template. By having a basic design and website structure in place, you don’t have to start from scratch, just make changes to what’s there to create something new. The process of building your website will be easier if you’re able to start with a template that comes close to what you want your website to look like. Make sure you go with a website builder that offers a lot of templates—at least 100. Finding one you really like will save you work and time once you start customizing it.   Branding Options Some website builders (especially free or low-cost ones) won’t allow you to remove the website builder’s branding from your site. That might not be a problem for personal websites, but for a business website, it makes you look unprofessional and distracts from your own branding. When your visitors see a logo, you want it to be yours. Another good way to differentiate your website’s brand is to include a favicon on  your website. These are the little images that show up in the browser tab when your website is open, next to your page’s title. This gives your site a little extra branding and makes it easier for visitors to find your site amongst their open tabs or in their bookmarks. Try to find a website builder that allows the option to add your own favicon and makes it easy to do so.   Security The scary part of getting a website for your small business is security concerns. We’re all used to hearing stories about high-profile security breaches. The last thing you want is for your business to be at the center of a story like that. A good website builder will help  you set up the necessary security precautions you need to keep your business and your customers safe. In particular, look for the option to easily get an SSL certificate and install compatible security software.   Mobile-Friendly Design You can’t ignore the prominence of mobile. People now use their mobile devices to access the web more often than their computers. If you build a website that doesn’t work well on mobile, a good portion of your visitors won’t be able to use it (and won’t become customers). A good website builder has to make it easy for you to create a website that will work just as well on mobile devices as it does on a full-size computer. Look for a website builder that has responsive options or, even better, responsive templates so you can start with a mobile-friendly structure and not have to do anything special to get there.   Media Options Many online marketing strategies include video and audio media. If there’s any chance you’ll be using video or audio on your website—now or ever—then you want a website builder that will make it easy to add media files and embed video on  your pages. Check what kind of media features your website builder has before committing.   Analytics Access Building a new website is just the first step. Once your website is live, you want to track how people find and interact with it to gain an understanding of what’s working and how to improve your results over time. Find out what kind of analytics your website builder will provide and if it allows you to connect the builder dashboard to Google Analytics . The easier it is to see how your website is performing, the easier it will be to make the kind of updates that help you earn more visitors and new business.   Automated Backups If you’ve ever had a computer crash, then you know how important backups are. Even though website builders make creating your website easy, it doesn’t mean you want to have to do it all over again. Manual backups can protect you some, but automated website backups mean you never have to worry about remembering to back your site up yourself. No matter what happens, you’ll always have a recent version of your site you can access and restore as needed. Find a website builder that offers automated backups to make your life easier and your site safer.   SEO Features Imagine finally getting your website out there, only for no one to find it. With as crowded as the web is today, that’s a real possibility. One of the best strategies you have to make sure people actually show up to the small business website you create is SEO (search engine optimization) . While there’s a lot to doing good SEO for a new website, one of the first parts is optimizing your individual pages for the primary keywords you want to rank for. A website builder that includes SEO features will make customizing the most important parts of the page for SEO a lot easier so you can get an edge in the search engines from day one.   eCommerce Options Not all small business websites will need this in a website builder, but if you want to sell items through your website, then it’s a necessity. eCommerce software allows you to list products on your website, provide a checkout process, and securely accept payments online . If you’ll need these features, prioritize finding a website builder that offers eCommerce options so adding them onto your website will be a simple task.   The Best Website Builder for Your Small Business Don’t drag your feet on building a website for your small business. The benefits it will bring far outweigh the time and expense involved in getting started, especially when that time and expense is cut down by using a good website builder to get your business online fast . HostGator’s website builder not only provides everything mentioned in this post, but it also comes with free website hosting, saving you a little extra on the whole deal. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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7 Marketing Goals for Your E-commerce Website in 2019

Posted on November 18, 2018 by Hosting

The post 7 Marketing Goals for Your E-commerce Website in 2019 appeared first on HostGator Blog . The online world moves fast. Each year, it’s a good idea to consider the goals you have for your website to see if they need some updating. For an e-commerce website, some goals will always stay consistent, but others will evolve or change completely year by year. This year, here are a few good goals to consider setting for your website in 2019. 1. Increase relevant traffic. Increasing traffic is probably a familiar goal for you. For pretty much every website, accomplishing whatever it’s meant to do requires people visiting the site.  But not all traffic is created equal . If your marketing is bringing in traffic, but it’s mostly made up of people who will never have a need for your products or services, then it’s not doing you much good. For instance, a B2B software company probably wouldn’t benefit from a huge amount of traffic if most of it was coming from teenagers In addition to continuing your marketing efforts for raising traffic, this year take some time to analyze if the traffic you’re getting seems to match up with the target audience you’re trying to reach. In the Audience section of Google Analytics , you can find a lot of information about the kinds of people visiting your website, including:      Demographic information like age and gender      Interests they have, based on their other browsing information      Geographic information      Tech information like the device and browser they use That can go a long way to helping you figure out if you’re reaching the people you’re trying to.  If you find that you’re not, then it’s time to rethink and refine your marketing efforts to make sure they’re more targeted moving forward. Once you increase your site traffic, it’s time to upgrade your hosting to meet demand. Learn more about your web hosting options to choose the best fit for your website needs.   2. Grow your email list. Getting people to your website is a big part of being successful, but getting them to come back so you can form an ongoing relationship is even more important. One of the best tools you have to do that is your email list. When someone opts into your email list, they’re opening the door to ongoing communication with your brand – which is a big deal! It’s no surprise that email marketing has one of the highest conversion rates of the main online marketing activities. That means that one of the best ways to improve your website’s success in the coming year is to put more of an emphasis on growing your email list. You can do that by offering deals to your customers for signing up, promoting it on social media , and including CTAs throughout your website urging people to subscribe. And make sure you keep the emails you send relevant and useful so you keep those subscribers once you get them. They’re too valuable to lose lightly. If you haven’t set up email marketing for your website yet, get started today with Constant Contact .    3. Provide visitors a personalized experience. Each of your visitors is a unique person who interacts with your website in their own way. Technology now makes it possible for you to track how people interact with your website and customize their experience on the site as they go. You can suggest items that are similar or complementary to what they’re looking at, or deliver up content on topics that are related to the piece they clicked on. One study found that providing a personalized web experience for visitors can cause an 18% uptick in sales. When you make it easier for people to see the parts of your website that are most relevant to them, it increases their chances of having a good experience and continuing their relationship with your brand.   4. Make your website responsive. By this point, the reasons to make your website mobile friendly are well known and if you’re reading this, you’ve probably already taken that step (you have, right?). In the coming year, Google’s planning to roll out mobile-first indexing , meaning that their algorithm will give greater priority to your mobile website in determining rankings. That means you want your mobile website to have the same content and information on it as your desktop website, just visually optimized for a mobile screen. Making your website responsive is one of the best and easiest ways to do that. And in general, make it a goal to make an effort to pay attention to your mobile experience and make sure your website is easy and intuitive for people on mobile to use. Mobile’s not going away and is likely to continue to become more important with every passing year, so you have to treat it like the priority it is.   5. Go beyond blogging. By now, a lot of businesses have blogs – and that’s usually a good choice. A blog is a powerful marketing tool. But because there are so many blogs out there already, making your content stand out is increasingly hard. One way you can shake things up a little this year is to consider other types of content to explore. Branching into podcasts, videos , or interactive content can help you supplement the blog content you have now and may enable you to reach a new audience. Taking a broader approach to your content strategy by bringing in new format types also allows you to get a better idea of what your customers respond to. Some of the content may fall flat, but some of it may perform even better than your written content did. By experimenting with new forms, you can come to understand your audience even better and continue to refine your efforts based on what works for them.   6. Partner with influencers. With so many blogs and social media channels for people to move between on the web, getting your content in front of people is one of the biggest marketing challenges businesses consistently face. One good tactic for reaching more people is developing relationships with people and platforms that already have a large audience. That could be by creating affiliate marketing relationships with influencers, by guest posting on their blogs, or by collaborating with them on projects. Whatever form it takes for your business, working with influencers can help you catch the attention of new people in your target audience and get them back to your website where you can work on building a relationship with them.   7. Increase sales. For e-commerce businesses, this goal will remain consistent in all years. For your website and business to thrive, you have to be making sales. Everything else on this list is designed to help make that happen, but you should also look to your own analytics from past years. Figure out what tactics have worked the best for getting you sales – not just traffic or email signups (which matter too), but marketing activities specifically led to sales. While there are general trends each year that should guide what you try, the most important thing you should look to is what’s working best for your particular business. At the end of the day, your business is unique. Only you can work out what makes the most sense for you and your audience. Analyze your metrics and design your marketing plan to optimize doing more of whatever is getting you sales now. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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7 Benefits of Google Advertising

Posted on November 9, 2018 by Hosting

The post 7 Benefits of Google Advertising appeared first on HostGator Blog . Everyone with a website has likely spent time thinking about Google and how to improve your visibility in the search engine. While SEO  gets a lot of attention (and rightly so), it’s not the only game in town. The fastest way to get your website right at the top of the SERP is with Google advertising . If your website isn’t getting as much traffic as you’d like and you want a fairly quick and easy solution (and are willing to pay for it), Google advertising is well worth considering. 7 Reasons to Use Google Ads Any business with an advertising budget has a lot of tactics and channels to choose between. Google Ads offers a few key benefits that can set it apart from some of your other options.   1. It’s a fast way to get noticed. SEO is an important way to build your website’s visibility and get more visitors, but it’s slow. Most businesses can expect to spend months of continual work before they start to see much progress – and sometimes longer. Not all businesses can wait that long for results. If you want to start gaining traction and getting people to your website faster, Google advertising works as a shortcut to getting the kind of visibility and results you want from SEO faster and with less work.   And with Google Ads, your ads usually show up above the natural results and can sometimes include images as well, which makes them that much more noticeable and likely to earn a click.   2. Google’s reach is vast. Google gets over 3.5 billion searches every day . Advertising on Google gives you access to one of the largest audiences you’ll find anywhere. But the Google Ads platform goes even further than that. In addition to buying ads on the search engine results page itself, you can also buy ads for Google’s other properties – including the extremely popular Gmail and YouTube – and for all 2 million websites and 650,000 apps that are included in Google Display network. All of that adds up to Google Ads reaching over 90% of all internet users worldwide. That’s a bigger reach that you’ll get from just about any other advertising channel.   3. You can target ads for relevance. The possibility of reaching a lot of people is nice, but what’s even more important is figuring out how to reach the right people. Google Ads offers two main types of targeting that are both very important for getting your website in front of the people most likely to click to visit and buy your products: Keyword targeting – The best visitors and leads will be the people who find your website when they’re in the process of looking for what you sell. With Google Ads, you have a direct way to reach those people and get them to your website. Choosing the right keywords to target is one of the most important parts of getting good results from Google advertising, because it’s the best way to ensure your ads are consistently relevant to the people who see them. Demographic targeting –  Google has a lot of data on user behavior and demographics. When you advertise with Google, you get to tap into that data in order to better get your ads in front of the people most likely to be in your target audience. You can target your ads based on gender, age range, and general online interests. Google Ads’ targeting options are a powerful way to make sure your ads have relevance and reach the potential visitors that are most valuable to your business.   4. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Advertising is often useful for brand awareness, but your goal is usually less about just making people aware of your business and more about getting them to actually engage with your brand. A visit to your website is much more valuable than someone seeing an ad and scrolling past. The main payment model for Google Ads is pay-per-click (PPC) , meaning you don’t pay anything just to get your ad to show up – you only pay when someone clicks on it. You’re not paying for exposure; you’re paying for actual visitors. For marketers who have long had to struggle with figuring out how to show results for hard-to-measure ad campaigns, the PPC model means that you always know you got at least a website visitor out of the money you spent. And if you use Google Analytics (and you should!), you can track what happens with the visitor once they land on your website as well.   5. It’s easy to control your budget. You don’t have an unlimited budget. When you invest in a paid marketing channel like Google Ads, you have to know that you can stay within the limitations of the budget you have. Luckily, Google Ads has no minimum spend, so even small businesses that can’t spend much can use it. And the platform makes it easy to set your daily maximum budget. Once you go over it, Google will simply stop showing your ads so you never spend more than you intend.   6. Remarketing reconnects you with relevant leads. Every visitor that comes to your website is a potential customer, but many will visit their first time without making a purchase. Between the busy lives people lead and the ad saturation we all face both on and offline; a visitor could easily forget your brand completely after that first visit. Google Ads provides remarketing , which lets you serve relevant ads to past visitors that make them more likely to come back and engage with your brand again (and hopefully buy). You can even use the data on what a visitor did on your website to further tailor remarketing ads by highlighting a product they viewed or content related to the pages they visited. Remarketing gives you a way to keep a relationship going after that first marketing touch point and continue to reach your most valuable leads.   7. You can improve campaigns over time with useful analytics. No one gets everything right on the first try. Google Ads provides useful analytics that provide a detailed view of what works in your PPC campaigns and what doesn’t, so you can continually improve your ads and the results they achieve over time. The longer you run campaigns with Google Ads, the more data you’ll have on what your target audience responds to. By continually making updates to your campaigns as you learn, you can count on a higher ROI.   Get Started with Google PPC When your budget’s limited, accepting the need to dive into paid channels for online marketing can feel like a tough sell. But even for the types of online marketing that are technically free, like content marketing and social media, the amount you spend in time or on hiring professional help quickly adds up as well. The extra boost you get from investing in Google Ads can make your other marketing efforts go further and help you get greater visibility and more traffic faster.   Ready to get started with Google advertising? HostGator’s team of PPC experts can work with you to develop a strategy for your website and execute your campaigns. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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How to Create a Forum for Your Website

Posted on October 29, 2018 by Hosting

The post How to Create a Forum for Your Website appeared first on HostGator Blog . Whether you run a business website or a personal blog, one of the main reasons to build a website is to reach other people. If you want your website to become a place people regularly want to visit, then your goal should be to build a community around it. That’s a big goal, and you can help achieve it and even go a step further by creating a forum for your website. By enabling communication that goes more than two ways, a forum can create an active online community that not only engages with your content – but also allows users to interact with each other. In essence, a forum can become a valuable part of achieving your website goals. 5 Benefits of Creating a Forum For Your Website A forum does require extra work, so you want to be confident it’s a good choice for your particular type of website before diving in. If done well, creating a forum for your website can yield some significant benefits.   1. It provides a place for a community to grow. Having a website that gets visitors is nice, but if most of what you learn about your visitors is what you see in Google Analytics , then there’s a lot you still don’t know. Getting visitors isn’t the same thing as having a community. A community is active and engages with your website on a regular basis. The members of a community feel like they’re a part of something when they come to your website. They have a higher level of investment than someone just passing through. That makes them valuable partners in the overall success of your site.   2. It gives readers a reason to keep coming back. Many websites struggle with turning one-time visitors into regular traffic . Anyone who participates in your website’s forum cares about what others in the community have to say. They’ll want to see responses to the posts they make and follow conversations on topics they’re interested in. To stay a part of the conversation, they’ll keep coming back.   3. Your readers can learn from each other, as well as from you. You work hard to provide valuable content to your visitors. As your community grows, you’ll have a difficult time answering every single question they have. And sometimes, other people in the community will have better answers anyway. Giving community members direct access to each other can be especially useful for any business that sells complicated products. Your customers can help each other do general troubleshooting, offloading some of your customer service burden while still resulting in satisfied customers. We see this at work in the HostGator forums . When one web hosting customer asks a question, another often chimes in with the answer. Newer members get the help of more experienced members, and long-term participants are able to distinguish themselves as helpful and knowledgeable in the community.   4. You can see what your followers are talking about. If you do content marketing , then you know that coming up with relevant topics your audience cares about is an ongoing challenge. But even if you don’t, any glimpse into the questions and issues your audience has can translate into useful feedback on your website and products. Businesses frequently spend money and time on market research to try and figure out what their audience is thinking. When you have an active forum, all you have to do is follow the conversations your members have there to gain the same information. The forum in Carol Tice’s subscription community for professional writers helps fuel her blog posts. She can reference forum conversations and answer common questions she sees members ask. Because of the discussions in the forum, she knows the topics her audience cares about and can make sure her website provides the answers they’re looking for.   5. An open forum can improve SEO. Private forums can make sense for businesses that want to create a subscription community or membership website, but if you go that route you do lose out on this benefit. If you create a forum for your website that’s accessible on the open web, then every new conversation your community members have creates a new page to be indexed by search engines. Not only is regular fresh content good for SEO, but as your forum begins to cover more and more topics (using the language of your audience, no less), those forum pages and user-generated content could begin to show up for search terms you haven’t covered yet on your main website.   How to Create a Forum on Your Website Ready to set up your website forum? Here are three steps to get started.   1. Choose the right web hosting plan. If you’re ready to get started and create a forum on your website, then one of your first steps is to evaluate if your web hosting provider is up for the job. If your forum accomplishes the goal of bringing a community of regular visitors to your website, then you can expect an uptick in traffic. Make sure the web hosting plan you have now can support the forum software you choose to use and the increase in traffic likely to occur. If your current plan isn’t going to cut it, take time to figure out a better option before you start building your forum.   2. Choose the right web forum software. Next, you’ll need software to create your forum with. Many of the most popular options are free and offer open-source software. A few of the top solutions to look into are:      phpBB      MyBB      Flarum      Simple Machines      bbPress Spend some time researching the different software options to get a feel for which will work best for you.   3. Create your forum. The right forum software should make this part relatively easy. The software you choose should offer resources to help you get started. Use them to get up to speed and start getting the basic structure of your forum in place.   How to Make Your Forum Successful For your forum to achieve your goals, you need to approach it with a strategy. These seven steps can help your forum go from a promising idea to a successful community-building tool.   1. Clarify your forum’s themes. What is your forum going to be about? People need to know what they’ll be joining before they can decide if it’s right for them or not. Before you launch your forum, clarify the primary themes and topics that people will be discussing there. When you launched your website, you (hopefully) took some time to figure out your unique positioning statement – what makes your website different from similar ones and why your visitors should care. Now you’ll need to do the same thing for your forum. Think about why it’s valuable from your audience’s point of view. What topics and issues will they want to discuss? Why should they do it on your website’s forum? Obviously, your forum’s themes should relate to what you cover on your website. Beyond that, get more specific in working out what the forum’s purpose and focus will be.   2. Create a structure. Now turn the themes you settled on into a clear structure. Decide on the main categories and subcategories to divide your forum into. Your URL structure should be intuitive. Organizing discussions into a few main topics will make it easier for your members to find the information they need. So again here, have your target audience top of mind. What categories will make the most sense to them in helping them find what they’re looking for? The structure you create in the beginning doesn’t have to be set in stone. As you see how people interact in the forum over time, you may find that adding new categories or re-arranging how they’re organized works better. Know that your forum structure can evolve as needed, but do your best to make it intuitive and clear to begin with.   3. Develop clear rules. You may hope your target audience consists of nothing but the most pleasant and respectful people on the internet – but it is still the internet we’re talking about. When people can interact with others anonymously behind their screens, some inevitably show their worst sides. You can’t just launch your forum and hope for the best. You need to start out planning for the worst. Think about what you want your forum conversations to look like, and explicitly what you don’t want them to include. For that latter question, a look at active comment sections around the web will show examples of what you want your members to avoid. Spend some time reviewing the rules of other forums around the web as well. Their rules can serve as a jumping off point for you to develop yours. As an example, some rules you may want to include could be:     Be respectful to other community members, even when there’s a disagreement     No slurs or other discriminatory behavior     No name calling     No links to or recommendations of illegal items or activities in the forum     No NSFW (not safe for work) material     No spamming Make sure you post the rules at the top of the forum where everyone will see them. Add a note that everyone who participates in the forum is agreeing to abide by the rules. And develop a process for what you’ll do when someone breaks the rules. How many warnings will you provide before banning a user? Are there steps a banned user can take to be reinstated? Your rules won’t be worth much if you don’t have a system in place to enact consequences when people break them. Write out what that system will be and make it accessible to your users in advance to avoid issues later.   4. Promote your forum . For discussions to happen, people have to show up. Create a strategy for letting people in your audience know about your forum. Many of the same online marketing tactics you use for your website will be valuable for promoting your forum as well. Announce the new forum to your email list. Create content promoting it on your website and other sites around the web. Promote it on your social media accounts. Consider investing in PPC or social media advertising to get the word out. Once you have a decent number of members, this step will become less important. But it should make up the brunt of your efforts in the first days and weeks your forum is available.     5. Create some good discussion topics to get the conversation started. You know when you’re at a party and everyone’s hesitant to get out on the dance floor until the first brave few souls start dancing? New members of your forum who are still getting a feel for the place are unlikely to jump right into starting discussions. It will be your job to get the ball rolling on the first few conversations while people get comfortable. Have a few discussion topics in mind and start posting them with encouragement for others to chime in. Some forums also have consistent weekly discussion threads that can bring people together at an expected time to get talking. Consider basing a weekly thread around industry news, new member introductions, or other topics you know your audience cares about.   6. Moderate the discussions. Moderation is a big part of the job of running a forum. Without moderation, your forum can fall prey to spammers and trolls. If the forum messages are dominated by people trying to promote scams or a toxic culture of insults – no one’s going to stick around. In the early days of your forum, you may be able to do all the moderating yourself. Keep an eye on all the active threads and react quickly to any that break the rules. Don’t be afraid to delete inappropriate comments and issue warnings and bans to users when needed. Over time, if the job becomes too big, you may need to hire someone or recruit active members of the forum to help with moderation. Be warned that moderation can be tricky. If people feel like they’re being deleted or banned unfairly, you may face dissension within the community. That’s what makes having clear rules so important. As needed, you can point back to the guidelines everyone in the community agreed to by choosing to participate.   7. Solicit feedback and improve as you go. Running a forum can get complicated and you’re not going to be able to plan for everything in advance. You can’t predict what your members will do or want, or what issues will arise as the community grows. So be willing to actively ask your community for their input and listen when they give it. Conduct surveys or start threads in the forum soliciting people’s suggestions and complaints. Even if your forum starts off strong, there will always be ways to improve it. Do your best to find out how you can make it better and improve the forum experience over time. Ready to start building your forum? Choose your forum hosting plan today and start creating a forum for your website . Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Beginner’s Guide to Google Ads

Posted on September 14, 2018 by Hosting

The post Beginner’s Guide to Google Ads appeared first on HostGator Blog . The web is crowded and getting people to visit your website – out of all the other options available to them – is an ongoing challenge that all website owners are familiar with. One useful tool for getting your website in front of more people is Google Ads (formerly called Google AdWords).   Why to Use Google Ads You only have so much money to spend promoting your website, so what makes Google Ads worth the investment? Google’s advertising platform provides a few main benefits that make it worth considering: 1. Your ad can reach a huge audience. Google Ads doesn’t just control the ads that show up on the search engine (which billions of people use each day), it’s also behind the ads on all Google properties (including YouTube and Gmail) and a huge number of other websites included in the Google Display Network. All told, the Google Ads platform reaches over 90% of all internet users, making it the best tool for reaching a large audience online. 2. Google offers targeting options.   For a lot of businesses, reaching a lot of people is less important than reaching the right people. Google Ads allows you to target which search terms your ads show up for, what people see your ads based on demographic information, and the types of sites they show up on in the display network. All of that helps you to more efficiently reach the people most likely to care about your website. 3. You only pay when people visit your website.   With a lot of advertising, you pay for the exposure the ads bring you. Google Ads uses a pay-per-click model, so you only pay for the times people actually click on an ad and visit your website. 4. It’s faster than most online marketing tactics . While tactics like SEO and content marketing are valuable, they’re slow. Google Ads gets your website in front of more people faster. If your online marketing efforts could use an extra boost, PPC marketing with Google Ads can provide it.   How to Set Up Your Google Ads Account Setting up an account in Google Ads is pretty easy. When you’re on the Google Ads website . You’ll see a big green button that says Start Now. After you click, you’ll encounter a form that asks you to provide your email address and the website you’ll be promoting. You’ll need to use an email here that’s already associated with a Google account, so if you already use Gmail and Google Analytics , use the same account you use there. If not, you can set up a new account here. You’ll be asked to log into your Google account, then you’ll be in.   6 Best Practices for Google Ads While you could theoretically dive right in and start creating ads today, in order to get the most out of the money you spend on Google Ads, you need to take some time to learn the ropes. Google has a series of videos that can offer a good start to understanding the platform and how to use it. Going through them all can take some time, but for most website owners it’s worth it. Until then, here’s a shorter summary of best practices to keep in mind.   1. Determine your goals. What is it you want from your Google Ads? Are you at the point with your website where the most important thing is getting those initial leads to learn you exist, or do you want visitors to convert to customers right away? Your Google Ads campaigns should be designed around the main goals you want to achieve.   2. Do keyword research. This is one of the most important steps in PPC marketing. Your keyword lists will be a big part of the campaigns you set up for search. You want your ads to show up specifically when people are looking for what you have to say or sell. The way to learn what terms people are using (and how competitive different terms are) is to take time to do the research.   3. Prioritize relevance. One of the best things about online marketing is that you can more effectively reach the specific people most likely to be interested in your website in the context where they’re looking for or thinking about what you have to sell. Your ads will perform much better if you can make them relevant to the person at the moment they see them. Good keyword research is a big part of this, but you should also do ad targeting based on demographic information and user interests to better get your ads in front of the right people. And relevance has to go beyond what shows up on the ad: your ad content should always match what people will see when they click through.   4. Test out your ads. It will probably take you a few tries to figure out what gets people to respond to your ads. Try out different ads with different wording, different images, and different targeting to collect data on which ones work best. If you just do one thing, you won’t ever know if it could be working better.   5. Use retargeting. Getting a visitor to your website once is nice, but getting them to come back again is much more valuable. Google Ads provides retargeting so you can target your ads to the people who have already viewed your website and even use it to show them ads for the items they viewed while they were there.   6. Refine as you go. Google Ads provides useful analytics that will help you gain a greater understanding of what your audience responds to based on your ad performance over time. And the platform even factors your ad success into how much you pay for each click through the Quality Score. You Quality Score is determined based on how well your ads perform, and can affect your pricing.   For best results, Google Ads requires a time commitment. If you don’t have a lot of time to spend on running your Google Ads campaigns, you may benefit from hiring a PPC specialist or agency who can bring their expertise to your campaigns and help get you better results while saving you time. If you stick with doing it yourself, actively monitor your campaigns. Pay attention to the data they provide and use it to improve your campaigns over time. If you manage your ads well, you can expect to see better results the longer you use the platform.   How to Create a Campaign in 6 Steps Google Ads makes it pretty easy to get started by walking you through the steps to create a campaign. A note here: Google Ads just recently rolled out an all new interface, so if you have any past experience with it or have done research into it from resources created before this summer (2018), then you’ll notice that the platform looks different that you probably expected.   To get started in the new interface, look for Campaigns in the menu on the left side of the page. Then click either the plus sign in the big blue dot on the left side of the page, or where it says New Campaign toward the bottom. Select New Campaign. 1. Choose Your Campaign Type You’ll see a page that includes the five main types ads you can create in Google Ads: Search ads – Ads that show up on the search engine results page, usually above the natural results Display ads – Ads that show up on websites across the web Shopping ads – Ads that show up on the search engine results page for product-related searches that often include images and information like price and availability. Video – Ads that show up before or on the bottom of YouTube videos. Universal app – Ads that show up on mobile apps. Make your selection for which type of ad you want to use in your first campaign. You can run multiple campaigns, so choosing one now won’t keep you from creating the other types of ads as well.   2. Select Your Goal Now the platform will ask you to choose your goal for the campaign. It will fill in different suggestions here based on the campaign type you choose, but the most common options are:      Sales      Leads      Traffic      Brand awareness      Product and brand consideration You can also choose to create your campaign without choosing a specific goal. Choosing your goal allows Google Ads to better determine how to track your campaign’s success and provide you with the most important analytics.   3. Define Your Settings On the next page, you’ll do a few important things. First, give your campaign a name. This is for internal use only, so you just need to make sure it’s something that makes sense to you and any other marketers who will be accessing the PPC account, and that it will differentiate this campaign from any others you create. Next, choose whether you want your ads to show up in the search network, the display network, or both. Ads in the search network will show up on the Google search engine results page, as well as on other Google properties. Those in the display network will show up on websites all across the web.   Select Your Language and Geographic Targeting Next choose your location and language targeting. If your business is local, then you don’t want to waste money on clicks from people in other states or countries. And if you only have a staff that speaks one language, then you’ll want to stick with reaching customers you can communicate with. Set Your Budget Now we get to the money side of things. Set your maximum daily budget, as well as the maximum amount of money you’re willing to pay for each click. As you’d expect, the higher you go, the more times your ads will show up and the more visitors you can expect to come to your website. You can either choose to do the bidding for your ads manually, or you can let Google choose bids for you automatically. The latter option is recommended for everyone but the most experienced of Google Ads users. The Google Ads automated option is programmed to get you the best possible results for the amount you spend, so it’s usually a good choice. Provide start and end dates for your campaign, or select None if you’d like the campaign to run indefinitely.   Audience and Extensions At the bottom of the page, you’ll see a few optional sections. The most important of these are:   1. Audience Targeting This is where you can define who will see your ad in terms of their general search habits and interests. It’s also the section where you can set up remarketing to show ads to people who have already visited your website. 2. Extension options You’ll see a few different extension options . These all give you the chance to add some extra information to your ad, whether it’s including links to additional web pages on your site, adding your phone number, or providing extra details like price or discount offers.  These are a good way to provide important information in a way that stands out and gets the viewer’s attention. Once you’re done with this page, click Save and Continue. 4. Add Your Keywords The next page is where you bring in the keyword research you’ve done. You can set up a number of Ad Groups for each campaign. In each group, you only want to include ads that are focused on a particular product or service so that you can use a specific set of keywords that will be relevant to those ads. 5. Create Your Ads This is the part where you’ll need to bring your creatives in (or bring your own creative skills to the process). Load the images and copy you want to use for each ad that’s relevant for the keywords in this ad group. 6. Pay and Launch When you’ve got everything else set up, you’ll see a red banner over the top of the Google Ads interface letting you know to add your payment information to make your campaigns active.  Click on Fix It and enter your payment information where prompted. Follow Your Campaigns and Improve The hard part of getting started is now done, but you still have work to do. Make sure you pay attention to your campaigns and track the analytics Google Ads provides. Use the data available to make changes to your ads, your budget, and your targeting to get more relevant clicks and better conversions over time. While Google Ads is notable for getting faster results than some other types of online marketing, it’s still true that you’ll get more out of it the longer you do it, as long as you do the work of learning from your campaigns and improving them as you go. When done well, Google Ads can provide a healthy ROI and bring a lot of new relevant traffic to your website. Get expert help managing your Google Ads campaigns. Learn more about HostGator’s PPC Advertising services . Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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