Google AdWords Clinic Successful

About 20 people showed up to our clinic on how to get started with Google AdWords yesterday which really filled up a sweltering room at the Lichtenstein Center in Pittfield. Many thanks to everyone who showed up and endured the environment. Our next clinic, which will partially be on Google Local Business Center, will happen at the end of September.

Yesterday we went about 1/2 hour longer than expected due to the plentiful, and very intelligent questions from the attendees. AdWords seems very complicated because it is so feature-rich, not necessarily because it is a complex idea or method. We did have a lot of back and forth regarding search engine optimized content and we want to reiterate that AdWords and SEO are not mutually exclusive activities.

There is huge value in creating SEO content but there is a lot of time, effort, and $$$ involved in creating this content. Once you’ve created SEO content there is a false assumption that this content will immediately crawled and propogated around the world unless you already have a huge amount of web traffic and are regularly getting indexed by the search engines. It will take time for traffic to build on your SEO assets and it will take active promotion on your part to start getting traffic. Meanwhile, you’ve built an asset that you could more fully leverage by directing paid search traffic to it.

You can quite easily create a transaction-oriented landing page for a Google AdWord out of informational SEO content on your website. As revealed in the clinic, visitors to your website that arrive via organic links are “browers” looking for information, whereas visitors to your website that arrive via an AdWord are much more likely to engage in transactive behavior even if they are visiting the same content [this is a citation from a study by EngineReady.com and outlined on Webmaster Radio on 7/28/2009].

The numbers don’t lie and since the time required in fine-tuning your content for SEO is considerable, it only makes sense to make the most of the content you’ve invested in by getting a version of it to the top of results pages via a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign.

Thanks again to everyone for their interest and time – we will post a video version of the slideshow here presently.