9 Reasons Your Small Business Needs Google Ads

Digital marketing has never been more complicated. Between social media (with new platforms being added all the time), content marketing, SEO, affiliate marketing and every other buzzword under the sun, it’s getting harder and harder to decide where you need to spend your time. That's why I want to share with you 9 reasons that your small business needs Google Ads.

The exact marketing strategy that will work well for you depends on your specific business needs, which is why I always start with consultations for potential clients.  Every business is different – different clients, different strategies, and a different budget. However, there is one constant that continues to be a reliable lead generation channel which I recommend to almost all of my clients: Google Ads.

Essentially the most ancient of the modern digital marketing stack, Google Ads fell out of favor for a few years as other hipper channels like social & content marketing took the world by storm. Google Ads always stuck around, however, as the backbone of digital distribution and is now experiencing a renaissance – as the other flavor-of-the-decade channels saturate (and Facebook ads can sometimes be costly, ineffective, or just hard to manage), Google Ads is becoming more important and effective than ever.

Here are 9 reasons I highly recommend making Google Ads a central part of your business’s digital marketing strategy.

9 Reasons Your Small Business Needs Google Ads

1. It helps with your search rankings

Google consistently denies it, but anyone who has invested heavily in Google Ads knows it’s a reality – investing in Google Ads always results in your organic search traffic also increasing. For whatever reason, whether artificial or otherwise, paying for Google Ads also improves your natural SEO performance.  (This does not necessarily mean ranking higher – but more organic traffic as people search for your link to click on it instead of an ad.)  Bonus – saves you paying the cost per click.

2. It’s a great way to drive local search results

Local SEO is booming, and consistently delivers the highest conversion rates of any acquisition strategy. Companies that do well in local search results, do well, period. Not only do Google Ads allow you to very specifically (by radius!) target a certain location, it also allows you to show location immediately to searchers.

This means, a customer in your target search radius searching something related to your business will see your business first thing, as well as a handy address right below it that links to a map showing exactly where you are!

3. Google Ads lets you capitalize on seasonality

The issue with other forms of marketing like SEO and content marketing is that its passive marketing – it grows your base over the long haul. If you’re a business with some key seasonal opportunities, this is a huge inefficiency. With Google Ads, you can capitalize on individual events when they happen to drive traffic.
This doesn’t just mean things like Black Friday or Boxing Day. Consider a winter sports company that runs ads on the year’s first blizzard. Powerful, right?

4. The long tail is where it’s at

Google Search is becoming harder and harder to use as a marketing device, simply because it’s so saturated. Billions of keywords are being competed for by millions of companies – finding short, high-volume keywords to stand out for is incredibly hard.
The opportunities left in SEO are “long tail” keywords – long, specific sentences or highly localized search with small volumes and low competition. Google Ads aren’t just a way to capture those keyword groups, they’re also a great way to test their viability – any long-tail keywords that show promise in PPC ads are worth a more long-term SEO investment.
This all points to a broader conclusion: Google Ads are a great way to experiment and optimize your SEO strategy in the right direction.

5. Google Ads allows retargeting

One of the most powerful marketing techniques in sheer ROI over the last half-decade has been retargeting – advertising to people who have either visited your website or engaged with you in some way in the past. Retargeting is powerful because you’re reaching people who have already been qualified to have some interest in what you offer.
Google Ads enables retargeting, allowing you to follow interested leads to the point where they’re at their peak buying interest – when they’re searching for something related to your business. Retargeting means you no longer have to be top-of-mind to prospective customers – your ads will go to them when they’re looking for you.

6. Google Ads are great for Mobile

Unlike desktop, mobile search has a very small amount of real estate – when you search something, instead of immediately seeing a whole page of results, you’ll likely only see the first 2-3 items on your screen. As a result, Google Ads are especially powerful on mobile (which represents the vast majority of search traffic) because your ad will stand out even further from the rest of the search results.
There’s also far less ad blindness on mobile, so ROIs are always consistently higher – if your customer base has any mobile presence at all, Google Ads are a must.

7. Precisely analyze your marketing

The challenge with most digital marketing is in tracking it. Despite all the modern tools available, it’s still often a challenge to measure the effectiveness of content marketing, referral marketing, SEO, etc. It often takes months or even years to confidently say if a marketing campaign gave positive ROI or not – making it really hard to move quickly and repeat the results. SEO can take years to optimize, for instance.
Google Ads can be created and deployed in minutes, and offer analytics so precise you pretty much know exactly who clicked on which ad, what they did when they got to their site, and even what they did when they left. The customer journey on a Google Ad is so finely tuned, you can start experimenting with it right away – in other words, the turnaround time to optimizing a Google Ad can be weeks or even days.
Not to mention an additional benefit: Google Ads’ granularity in tracking will help you understand your customers as a whole, better.

8. Google Ads will scale

The challenge with channels like sales & content marketing is that they’re hard to scale. To grow your business exponentially using sales, you’re restricted by how fast you can hire salespeople and how effectively they can sell.
To grow exponentially using content, you’re restricted by a point of diminishing returns of content volume – content can only hit a certain point before it saturated as a growth lever.
Google Ads can scale as high as you need. This is a particularly potent benefit in that Google Ads also separates itself from the pack of other performance marketing channels – Facebook ads, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. The sheer volumes of Google Search dwarf its competitors – companies can scale into the hundred million in ad spend without reaching saturation.

9. Paid traffic converts better than organic traffic

This is a bit of a controversial point, and it varies by industry, but recent evidence suggests that paid traffic is beginning to outperform organic search – oftentimes by as much as double.
Don’t get me wrong: SEO is still crucial for a business’s success in digital marketing.  I actually recommend that all of my clients use a combination of SEO (for long-term, reliable traffic) and Google Ads (to move things along quicker).

If you’re still not convinced with these 9 reasons your small business needs Google Ads and wondering why you should trust me: I’m a Google Ads partner, certified for over 10 years. For years I’ve offered affordable Google Ads consulting (with a flat management fee – I don’t eat into your margins!) to hundreds of businesses. I’ve seen the changes in the industry, and one thing is clear: Google Ads and paid search are more important than they’ve ever been.

Is your business ready to get visible?  Download my Visibility Workbook now.