The use of PPC (pay per click) advertising can be beneficial for countless reasons. Not only are PPC ads a great way to bring in more traffic, they are incredibly cost-effective and are particularly useful for trying out new keywords or copy. It’s why Google AdWords continues to be popular with advertisers. Let’s take a closer look inside AdWords to discover some of their newer PPC options, including their smart display ads and their custom intent ads.

Inside AdWords’ Smart Display Ads

Smart display ads are ads that are automated by Google. This helps to make creating display ads much easier since all you’ll need to do is submit your creative assets (such as images, headlines, subheaders, and copy) along with your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) goal and Google will determine what the best possible combination of these elements are in order to meet your CPA. Google will also automatically find placements for your ad.

There are a number of advantages to creating your ads this way. For example, benefits include:

• The ability to test out different ad elements for other ad campaigns.
  
• Test ads that haven’t been working to see if any elements are salvageable.
  
• Find new placements.
  
• Spend less time optimizing and managing your own ads.

However, it’s worth noting that there are a few drawbacks. Namely, you’re giving up a lot of control over your ad. For example, you can’t bid down, you can’t exclude placements, and you don’t have control over the devices your ads are placed on.

How Your Web Page Speed Effects Your SEO and Adwords Performance

Even though you do give up some control, what makes smart display ads worth using is the fact that Google will automatically test out different elements of your ad to find the best possible combination.

Inside Adwords’ Custom Intent Campaigns

The custom intent audiences option now offered by Google AdWords provides a more accurate way to target consumers who are looking to make a purchase right now. It’s the equivalent of being able to walk up to a customer who is browsing items inside of a physical store and engaging with them. Using custom intent audiences, you’ll have a much better chance of closing a sale since the audiences your ad will be targeting will be looking to buy something that’s similar to your product or service.

For example, if you’re marketing an airline service and want to target customers who are going on vacation, you could set your customer intent to target people who are looking to go on vacation in Hawaii. Not only can you target potential customers searching for flights to Hawaii on Google using keywords like Hawaii vacation or flights to Hawaii, but you can also reach them on YouTube while they are watching Hawaii travel videos.

Adwords’ Custom Intent Makes Finding Your Audience A Breeze

Using the custom intent audience feature is easy. When creating a display ad, simply select “target” and choose “intent.” You can then choose either ‘DIY” which allows you to combine links and topics in order to pursue customers who are most likely looking to buy what you are selling, or you can choose “Auto-generated,” which leaves the work to Google’s machine learning technology in order to create audiences that are exclusive to the data of your brand based on inference.

When creating your new audience, you’ll name the audience, enter any keywords or URLs that are related to your target audience, and then create it. Based on the custom audience you’ve created, you’ll be provided with useful information like estimated reach, associated keywords, and potential audiences according to phrase.

Although the custom intent audience feature can be extremely useful in reaching customers who are looking to buy immediately, it’s worth noting that this feature is only valuable as a short-term strategy. If you’re looking to nurture leads over the long-term, using this feature is not the best option.

Choosing Between Smart Display Ads and Custom Intent Audiences

When looking inside AdWords to determine what the best PPC option is for you, you need to figure out exactly what you’re goal is. If you’re trying to boost sales short term, then using the custom intent audience feature can be quite valuable. When it comes to smart display ads, there’s much more that you can use them for, whether it’s attracting more long-term leads, finding new places to reach your target audience, or identifying what elements of your ads are the most effective to help with future ad campaigns.

Writing content can be tricky. Implementing the best SEO practices is important in order to help attract organic traffic to your site in order to read your content, but you should also make sure that your SEO efforts don’t detract from the quality of your writing–it needs to be of a high quality in order to engage those visitors, after all. Finding that perfect balance between writing for your brand and writing for SEO is no easy task. The following are a few tips on how to maintain that perfect balance:

1. Do Your Keyword Research

If you do the proper amount of keyword research, then you shouldn’t have to worry about trying to include the keywords you’ve chosen into the content you’ve written. If the keywords you chose were relevant to the content you wrote and vice versa, then odds are those keywords will be naturally used as you are writing your content and you won’t have to worry about going back and adding in keywords in potentially unnatural or repetitive ways that could lower the quality of your content.

2. Using Keywords In Your Headers

You don’t need to add keywords to each header you use. Your headers don’t just tell readers what the following content is going to be about–they also need to help incite reader interest. A lot of the time, adding keywords to your headers can make the header seem bland. Use keywords in your headers when the following paragraph is the meat and potatoes of your content. When it comes to the concluding header, worry more about creating a header that leaves a lasting impact than about finding a way to include your keyword.

Read More Related Articles: Are Keywords Still Required to Increase SEO Rankings? Click Here to Find Out

3. Know Where To Use Keywords

While you should use your keywords in the body of your content in a natural way, you should also make sure to include it in your title, meta title, meta description, and image alt text. This will make your content more easily identifiable for Google without potentially affecting the quality of your actual content.

4. Use Relevant Backlinks

Keywords aren’t the only way to write for search. Add relevant backlinks throughout your content. However, if the links don’t add value to the experience of your readers, then don’t add them–you’ll just frustrate your readers and clutter up your content with anchor text.

5. Don’t Overdo It

First of all, keyword stuffing is going to be penalized by Google, which is why you should try to keep your keyword density below two percent. Secondly, you should read through your content to get a feel for how it sounds. If any of your keywords sound out of place, then they’re affecting the quality of what you’ve written. Additionally, if it feels like the keyword is being repeated too often within a short span of space, it’s probably dragging the quality down.

The content you write serves many purposes as far as your inbound marketing strategy goes. It can help increase your search rankings, thereby boosting organic traffic and bringing in more potential leads. It can also help your readers to engage with your brand. However, this requires you to both write with your audience in mind as well as with SEO in mind. These are just a few tips that will help you maintain that perfect balance between writing for your brand and writing for search.

Still want to increase your SEO? Here’s how to do so using Google trends.