If you have an existing website and are not coming up well in organic searches, you really should be looking at optimizing your website (SEO) however, in the meantime, you can use PPC (pay per click) advertising to bring interested visitors (otherwise known as targeted traffic) to your website.
When people type a phrase or word into a search box, there are the organic listings that come up centre page, and advertisements which come up on the right hand side, and often at the top of the page. These advertsiements are PPC adverts. Website owners are paying to have their advertisement listed when people type certain keywords into the search box. It's a competitive bid based system. How much your advertisement costs you per click and where it is positioned will depend on how much you bid, how many others are bidding for the same keywords, how relevant your advertisement is to the keywords, and how relevant your website content is to the keywords.
If you haven't done so, sign up for an Adwords account and have a look around the site. There is plenty of 'how to' information on there. It is relatively easy to set up and get going. You can monitor your campaign and set daily budget limits.
You need to select keywords that people may search for when looking for your product or service. You write an advertisement using the template they provide. Use your keywords in the heading and try to keep the advertisement as relevant as you can. Choosing the most popular keywords may not be the best idea - these will be the most expensive due to the competition.
Use the Google keyword tool to look at the different keywords relating to what you are selling. Try selecting a few of the less popular ones and targeting those first. Try out the main keywords by all means, but the cost you pay per click will be higher - which is fine, if the results you get from your campaign are worth it.
Once you have a campaign going, monitor the number of enquiries it generates so you can work out what your advertising is costing you per enquiry it generates, and per sale.
There are numerous companies out there that will offer to run your Google Adwords campaign for a couple of hundred dollars a month. If you don't know anything about Adwords and you don't want to, then you probably should use one of these services. However, if you are prepared to do the research and establish which keywords are likely to be the best for you to use, you will probably be happier and often better off doing it yourself. I'm basing that on my own experience. I recently signed a six month contract with a major service provider to run a campaign I had been running for months. I quickly regretted it. Despite the low cost per click they offered, and their agreement to use my carefully selected keywords, about 75% of the visitors they generate don't stay on the site at all. Whilst running the campaign myself, only 25% of visitors clicked off the site immediately. This service generates far less visitors than I was able to and because so few of those are staying on the site, the real cost per click is several times more than what I was paying before. And, as has been typical of this company's customer service approach with other services over the decades, they really don't care how poor their service is.
I hope I've convinced you to have a go at Adwords yourself. Experiment. It may take you a few months of tweaking to get it right but you'll learn a lot along the way.
While you are running your campaign, don't forget to consider having your website properly optimized by an SEO expert - so your website comes up well in the organic listings. Once that occurs you won't need to spend money advertising.
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