Search advertising campaigns are built by bidding on keywords that your customers will search into Google to find businesses like yours. The key to a great search ads campaign is having most of your budget bidding on keywords with a high buying intent.

What is buying intent?

Buying intent relates to how ready this user is to buy or hire for whatever they’re searching for.

Examples:

A high buying intent search: Web designer near me

This user search implies they’re looking for a service provider who matches their needs. This user knows their problem and they know they need a professional solution.

A lower buying intent search: Web design inspiration

This user searches in order to learn more about their problem or explore potential solutions.

Both of these people are relevant for me to reach, but they’re at different stages of the buying process. I build search campaigns concentrated on high buying intent searches. This is where businesses on a limited budget will get their best returns. It is a strategy based on picking the low hanging fruit first. For small businesses, this is the most efficient place to direct their resources.

High buying intent keywords are more expensive.

Purchasing ads on high buying intent keywords is more expensive. Still, the more expensive, high quality keywords are worth the steeper price.

When paying for high quality, more expensive traffic, it’s important to recognize search ads are only one part of a bigger marketing process. If you have a poorly designed website that rarely converts visitors, your search ads budget won’t produce the returns you want.

Picking keywords sounds easy. Why pay someone to do it?

Picking the right keywords to advertise on is common sense for most businesses. Just list search terms that someone would enter to find your business. Especially with ChatGPT on hand, there isn’t any magic to it.

My expertise comes in when designing search campaigns that balance between picky and broad.  I have to give Google’s algorithms enough leeway to sometimes bid on keywords I wouldn’t have chosen in order to also show on the keywords that will drive me leads. These campaigns can never be perfect, but with oversight and knowledge of the tools you can have a search campaign that delivers leads with great returns on your spend.