Boost Blog Traffic Using Google Ads in 3 Ways

You’ve just transitioned to working from home. And the world is still in the middle of a pandemic, so you aren’t too keen to go out and meet up with friends as often as you used to. With all that free time, you decided to dust off your old WordPress blog and turn it into a proper content-sharing and moneymaking venture.

There are 1.86 billion active websites on the internet right now. Of these, 576 million are blog sites. It will definitely take more than high-quality content to boost blog traffic and gain a legion of regular readers.

Enter Google AdWords

Google AdWords can be a vital tool in your quest to get your blog to break from obscurity and into the online limelight. It’s a digital advertising platform that can help your blog site get that desired readership and traffic.

How does it work? Through the platform, advertisers like yourself can display ads on Google’s search engine results page. As an advertiser, you can pay to get your advertisements at the top of a search results page, based on the keywords you want to target.

Google Adwords can also add your text or image ad on one of its many partner sites. These partner sites host an ad that appears on the page after users search for keywords and phrases related to a business and its products or services.

Why Use It?

For starters, Google AdWords is easier to set up and generates results quicker than any search engine optimization or SEO strategy. You can set up and activate an AdWords campaign, and it can drive traffic at scale in the course of a single afternoon. On the other hand, an SEO campaign can take up to 12 months before you start seeing solid results.

An AdWords campaign is also highly scalable. When you’re able to create one that’s converting at a profitable rate, then there’ll be no reason to cap spend on that campaign arbitrarily. It lets you increase your PPC budget, and, in turn, your leads and profits will grow accordingly. This makes Google Ads highly suitable for businesses that need many leads but are short on time and heads.

The third reason is measurability. AdWords campaigns are highly measurable compared to traditional marketing channels, like TV, radio, and print. When compared to SEO and social media advertising, it’s also more transparent. 

Google Ads provides several PPC metrics that allow you to see what works and what doesn’t at a granular level. You can immediately determine if your campaigns are returning ROI.

Photo by Souvik Banerjee from Unsplash

Ways to Boost Traffic

1. Find out what your most effective keywords are

Chances are, you already have keywords that are already driving more traffic to your website—mixed in with those that could be damaging your chances of success. 

You wouldn’t want that now, would you?  

You can use the Google AdWords platform to find out what your most (and least) effective keywords are. On the platform, you’ll have access to analytical tools that provide essential information to prioritize search marketing campaigns that bring results and maximize the amount of traffic you’re drawing in.

The more time you allot in analyzing and improving your keywords, the more likely you will draw in the right audience. This will help generate more traffic, enhance web content and give you a greater chance of raising conversions.

2. Add competitors’ keywords to your headlines 

Another one about keywords? Yes, because they’re that important.

Highly competitive keywords are expensive. And truth be told, you won’t probably see any clicks unless you’re a big enough influencer.

Don’t go after the most competitive keywords in the whole industry. Instead, target the keywords your direct competitors use. Or better yet, include your competitors in your ad copy.

If you don’t feel comfortable mentioning competitors directly in your ads, this is still a great strategy to improve your keywords.

Locking down your most effective keywords and monitoring the ones competitors are using can be a lot if you already do everything on your blog. In this case, you can benefit from hiring AdWords professionals to help you out.

3. Use AdWords to “remarket” prior visitors to your site

If you are already using Google Ads, you can show your ads to people who have already visited your website. It’s a great way to recapture those visitors and bring them back to your blog site.

On AdWords, you can set up a campaign specifically for reaching previous visitors and users. This involves adding a piece of remarketing code or tag to pages on your site that you want to correspond to specific categories.

For example, if you are a travel blogger, you might create a “travel hacks” tag on the pages or blog articles that mention helpful travel hacks.

You can create a campaign and Google ads tailored for the keyword “travel hacks” using your AdWords account as an advertiser. So the visitors who spend time on your page that is tagged “travel hacks” will have a cookie saved in their browser so that they then see your ads about travel hacks across the vast number of Google partner sites in the Google Display Network.

Conclusion

Google Adwords is a great way to boost traffic and attract more readers to your blog. AdWords campaigns are not only scalable and measurable, but they also work faster than your average SEO strategy. Finally, by learning to target the right keywords and retargeting previous visitors to your site, your blog could get its share of the online limelight.