Keyword Advertising – How Not to OverPay Google

Before You Get Started:

Are you proud of your web-site? 

Does it have useful information that will drive your target audience to your restaurant? 

Does your web-site represent your restaurant well?

 If any of these answers are “NO”, then spend some time revamping your web-site before you being keyword advertising. 

Search Engines

Hopefully most of you have used Google or Yahoo! to look for information.  The way search engines like Google and Yahoo! work is take a word or group of words and provide a listing of what they hope to be the most relevant and popular results. 

As an example, you can see the results when entering “Pittsburgh Steelers” into the Google search box.

Keyword Listings

On the right side of the page, you see a listing under the “Sponsored Links” section.  This listing is a paid advertisement using Google’s AdWords technology.  We will do a step by step walk through of a sample keyword ad setup. 

Take a few minutes and setup an account with Google.  Go to http://adwords.google.com to go through a quick tutorial and setup a user account.  Once your account is setup, you are ready to get started.

Step 1: 

Name your campaign something you can remember.  You can change the name of the campaign later, so don’t worry too much about getting the campaign name perfect.

IMPORTANT:  Make sure to click the “Change targeting” link in the “Target customer by location” section.  If you do NOT, you will be advertising through the United States and wasting money on customers who will never be able to reach your restaurant.

Step 2:  Targeting by Location

 After you click the “Change targeting” link, the above page will appear.  You can enter a zip code, city name or region. 

STRONG RECOMMENDATION – Start with a small local region.  Zip Code or City is a good idea.  Keep the location you wish to target small, 10-20 mile radius is a good start.  You can always expand and add more locations later if you like.

Step 3:  Ad Copy

You want to have ad copy that will bring people to your site (click on your ad).  You can look at some different keywords that you think may be relevant to your restaurant and see what other people are writing for their ads.  Don’t worry, you can experiment and change your ad copy easily.  You can also have more than one advertising message saved and have Google rotate your ads to see which one is more popular. 

Step 4:  Choosing Keywords

IMPORTANT:  Here is another area people make mistakes.  You can spend a lot of money by trying to advertise for very generic terms such as “pizza” or “chinese food”.  The return on investment for these ads can be very low.  You will find that you can secure tons of inexpensive keywords by combining words such as “pizza” and the “city” where your restaurant is located.  Experiment with a variety of word combinations to see what works best.

Step 5:  Setting Daily and Per Click Limits

Be sure to set a daily budget, or you could end up with a huge bill from Google.  By setting a daily budget, your ad will run all day OR until the daily budget limit is hit.  You can also set the CPC – Cost Per Click – default bid.  $.10 is usually a good starting point.  This is how the system works for billing.  Everytime someone clicks on your ad, they will redirect to your web-site.  Google keeps track of all these clicks and billing you accordingly. 

 Step 6:  Turning off the Content Networks

Last step.  By default, Google sends your ad to other sites where your ad can be posted.  This is called the Content network.  So rather than seeing your ad which originates from a Google keyword search, your ad can be sent to other web-sites who will run your ad.  This Content network tends to have weaker results than Google’s keyword search results.  You can end up spending on advertising for less relevant sites.  Turn this content network option off to begin.

So stick to these tips and you can get started with inexpensive keyword advertising.  Some of these concepts may be a little complicated, but there are many small business owners who are benefiting from keyword advertising.  There are professional online marketing consultants who can help you, but I recommend that you have some knowledge of the ins and outs of keyword advertising so you can understand where your keyword marketing budget is being spent.  There may be other small business owners who you can talk with you have some experience with keyword advertising and can help you out with your own.

This blog post features Google’s Adwords, but Yahoo! is also good, and often provides better results per dollar.  Google has a larger marketshare, so you can reach more people with Google. 

The key strategy we are suggesting is that you start small to get familiar with keyword advertising and see some initial results.  Then as you optimize your campaigns, you can begin to get more aggressive with your budget and see if you can produce some huge results.

Hopefully this was post will help you from making some costly errors in your keyword advertising, or at least give you some familiarity with this marketing vehicle.

Good luck and happy keyword hunting.

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