You must have watched the WWE Royal Rumble Match.
It is a wrestling match in which several wrestlers compete and try to eliminate their competitors. The last man standing is the winner of the Royal Rumble.
(Image source: WWE.COM)
The same thing holds for PPC. It is a kind of online advertising “wrestling” where you compete for the same keywords and create ads for the same with thousands of others in an invisible ring—only to stay top of the searches.
It is not easy, especially for small businesses that struggle with budgets. Staying competitive is the key to your PPC campaign. Here are some tips to beat your paid search competition.
Ensure a Better User Experience:
Not everyone is ready to buy from you on their first visit to your website. That’s why it is important to keep your customers engaged when they are in the funnel.
Here I would like to share a real-life example. I have a client who sells used cycles online and delivers them directly to the customer’s doorstep. The two potential keywords would be used cycle vs. buy used cycle online. Someone looking for a used cycle is very likely someone who has never thought of the possibility of buying a cycle online. We needed to capture those visitors in their first clicks.
We created content telling the benefits of buying a used cycle online as well as positive customer reviews. Once they returned to the site, we adopted aggressive marketing to convince them why they should buy from us with convincing sale language. Although not all customers buy on the first click, efficient content and a great user experience will encourage them to return. This way, we have minimized the competitor’s advantage of higher bids.
Improve Your Quality Score:
Quality Score is Google’s rating of the user experience that your ads and landing pages give when searching for your keywords. And it also helps you beat your PPC competitors. Improving your Quality Score from 5 to 7 on generic or non-branded keywords can increase your ad rank by 40%. Not only does it lets you be more competitive with the same bids, but it also raises the CPCs that your competitors should pay to beat you. Raising their CPCs can force them to trim their budget. This way, it can blunt some of their power over the market.
Check the keyword level to identify what can be done to enhance the Quality Score and make the required changes immediately.
Be Particular:
PPC and budget issues go hand in hand if you are a small business. That’s why you have to be “street smart” in this stiff competitive landscape called PPC.
One of the ways is to be selective about the bidding terms. If your new project collaboration tool is competing with Trello, don’t just focus on “Trello”. Bid on terms like “Trello” + compare, reviews, alternatives, vs., and other terms that show a searcher who is assessing the multiple options. Also, focus on the terms that show the key features of your product.
Strive for Conversion Rate:
If your CPCs are going beyond budget, you need to try hard to raise your conversion rate. You can start with landing pages. Analyze the top-performing landing pages of your competitors.
Compare it with your landing page to find out where you are lacking. Your competitor might have increased their bids to get 30 percent more clicks, but that doesn’t necessarily bring them 30% more conversions.
Now check the quality of your offers. Maybe your competitors are offering a free quote but you are sticking to the same old eBook. If so, you can test a free quote.
Observe the Competitors’ Ads:
See the ads of your top competitors. What kind of ads they are running? Are they running display, video, or remarketing ads? To check out their text ads, just look for their company name or services while staying on the search engine results.
To see if they are having remarketing ads, you can visit their website and then check out if their ads show up on websites or social media networks visited by you.
Apart from checking what types of ads they are running, check where they are advertising. In today’s marketing era, there are several platforms to advertise, and you can now see ads on search networks, social media, and in some pieces of content. If your competitors operate a social media advertising campaign and have a lot of engagement on their page, it might give you a new advertising idea for your own business.
Check Out Their Pricing Structure:
Also, get familiar with the pricing structure used by your competitors for their products and services to stay competitive.
If you are looking to get more sign-ups for an appointment, see how much your competitors are charging for the same appointment. If you want people to make a purchase, say through an ad, make sure to check how your competitors are charging for the same product so you know what “pricing” can work.
If a prospect finds a similar product for a lesser price from your competitor, and you don’t have any unique value to offer, then that customer is likely to buy from your competitors. In this scenario, either you can lower the rate or add some information on why your products or services cost more.