Google Pay-Per-Click: How to Rank Higher

by The Marketing Professor at MyDentistCalls

When advertising your company on Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC), otherwise known as Google AdWords, you would be wise to utilize a strategy we like to call “Burn to Earn.”

“Burn to Earn” means you need to overbid your keywords so that you get the highest position early in your campaign.  There are several reasons why overbidding will ultimately save you money, but before we review those reasons, let’s start by explaining exactly how you rank in Google PPC.

Google PPC has a ranking system called “Quality Score.”  The premise of the system is that the better quality score you achieve, the lower you need to pay for each click you gain.  The position your ad shows in Google AdWords is based off of your quality score.  So an increased quality score means a higher rank at a lower price.  Often, a site with a high quality score will not only show higher on the page than a site with a lower quality score, but it will also pay less for its clicks than the site below it!  That’s why the Burn to Earn strategy is so important for your practice.

Quality Score is based on a number of factors – but you really only need to concern yourself with the 3 most important components:

1. Your Bid Price – This is the maximum amount you are willing to pay per click to your website.  The higher you bid, the higher in the results you are going to show.  However, other factors can allow you to bid lower and still show high on the page.
2. Your Keyword/Website Relevance – This is the relevance of your website to the keywords you are bidding on.  Unfortunately your site is hardly ever manually reviewed; so in order to let the search engine robots who will crawl your site know that you are a relevant site, you will need to structure your website properly.  If you utilize Search Engine Optimization, or SEO (SEO is discussed in detail in other articles) your website is optimized to a set of keywords.  You will undoubtedly score well in terms of relevance when bidding on those keywords.
3. Your CTR (Click Through Rate) – There are tricks to get your CTR higher which will help you greatly, but there is NO better way to increase CTR than to show #1 on the page.  This is where Burn to Earn comes into play.

Burn to Earn – When you initially set up your Google AdWords campaign you will be given a less than stellar quality score.   In order to improve that quality score and ultimately get your site showing high in PPC for a lower price you need to inflate your CTR right away.

To inflate your CTR quickly you will need to show high on the page; preferably #1 in the PPC results.  To do this with a low beginning quality score you will need to grossly overpay for clicks.   Yes, that’s correct – you will have to grossly overpay at first in order to utilize this strategy.  You will start by bidding very high for your clicks and continue to bid up until you are showing #1.  The price you will be paying for that #1 position is going to be steep, so don’t get scared off right away as this price point is only temporary.

In your AdWords Campaign, next to each of your keywords is a quality score ranking.  You will want to wait until your quality score hits 6 or 7 before you lower your bids.  This usually takes about a week, but the time period to earn that quality score could be longer or shorter.  It‘s extremely rare to get a quality score above 7 unless the keyword is you or your company’s name.  Generally, a keyword with a quality score of 7 means you are doing well.

Once your quality score hits your mark it’s time to start pairing down your bids.  Take 10% off your bids every other day until you fall out of the #1 position.  Once you fall out of the #1 position, you will then revert back to the bid you previously made before you fell out of the #1 position – and that bid price now becomes the bid price you use going forward to be #1 on the page.  From there you then have to decide if that bid price to be #1 is worth paying for – and that should be determined by the amount of quality phone calls you receive to the MyDentistCalls tracking number you place in your ad.  If the cost is too high, it may serve you well to rank #2.  Often the #2 slot can cost half of the #1 position which inevitably allows you a much lower cost per new patient.

Improving your quality score by overbidding to inflate CTR will ultimately get you a much lower Cost Per Click (CPC).  With a low CTR pulling down your quality score, Google will make you pay more for each click.  That is why you want to avoid a low quality score at all costs.  By utilizing the Burn to Earn strategy you will now have the tools to increase your quality score and then decide exactly what you are willing to bid for your clicks moving forward.

Good Luck and Happy Advertising,

The Marketing Professor at MyDentistCalls