You may already know, but we here at BoostSuite aren’t the biggest fans of Google Adwords. Don’t get us wrong: We love Google as a whole. They have great products that are free and fit in nicely with small businesses.
We’re advocates of these small businesses, so it’s in our nature to refute things that don’t fit in their marketing strategies. Here’s our article with 5 reasons not to use pay-per-click advertising if you’re a small business.
If you don’t want to read the whole article, here are the 5 reasons not to use PPC:
- It’s expensive.
- It’s time-consuming.
- It requires full-time efforts from you or one of your employees.
- It only delivers clicks, not sales.
- It gets more and more expensive.
We have managed quite a few PPC campaigns through Google Adwords in the past, and we know that these five reasons are legit.
To make matters worse, we recently received an email advertisement from Google Adwords (pictured above, click to expand) that contained some very misleading content:
“Your current customers most likely search for your business by name (e.g. “Anna’s bakery”). But prospective customers tend to search by topic and city, such as “Restaurants in New York” or “Florist in San Francisco”. With an ad on Google, you can make it easy for people to find you using the words they choose.”
Why We’re Unhappy with This Language
This verbiage implies that the only way to allow highly qualified searchers to find your small business for anything other than your brand name is to pay for Adwords Ads.
We know this is not true, otherwise, tools like HubSpot, Marketo, and BoostSuite wouldn’t exist. You could be paying Google anywhere from a few cents to multiple dollars per click. Trust me, that adds up VERY fast.
People can find your small business website in the organic search results, and you don’t have to pay Google for that. You simply have to conduct some due-diligence in the way of white-hat SEO.
Try These 4 Items to Get More Free Traffic
- Create and publish quality content to your website on a weekly basis.
- Optimize your content using a tool like BoostSuite (sign-up for free now).
- Promote your content through social media.
- Build your inbound links.
Do a little research. Don’t believe everything you hear/read. Don’t get swindled by Google Adwords. For small businesses, GA is usually a bottomless money pit. You may see some results in the way of traffic, but it definitely doesn’t justify the cost because Google doesn’t guarantee that these visitors will actually do/buy anything on your site once they get there. That’s completely up to you and your website content.
