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A low ad budget doesn’t have to mean minimal results. SMBs with spend under $5,000 can use these tips to improve their conversions.

Whether you’re a small business owner or an agency that works with SMBs, you’ve likely encountered issues with low ad budgets. SMBs are often spread thin and, especially in light of business shifts due to COVID, their ad budgets are, too.

However, low budgets don’t have to mean small returns for SMBs or their agency partners.

What is Google Ads? How does it work?

If you’re an SMB owner just getting started, here’s how it works: Google Ads offers paid advertising options for businesses of all sizes to promote their products and services across Google platforms like Search, YouTube, Shopping, and more. Ads display at the top of search results, in the local map packs, before and during YouTube videos, or on websites across the internet that opt into Google’s AdSense.

Google Ads, often referred to as pay-per-click (PPC), works on an auction system. Individual businesses submit a bid for their ads to show up in these ad locations for a greater chance at visibility with their target audiences.

At a fundamental level, Google looks at your bid amount, multiplies it by your Quality Score (a numeric estimate of the quality of your ads and their associated landing pages), and ranks the top ads in their advertising spots. If your ad is displayed, you pay only when your ad is clicked (hence pay-per-click).

How do small businesses use Google Ads?

The Ads bidding process may seem intimidating or cumbersome for small businesses investing in paid online advertising for the first time, but Google estimates that businesses profit $8 for every $1 spent on Google Ads. This can be a huge gain for SMBs and local businesses.

PPC allows businesses to target their audiences based on their particular demographics and locations — a big deal for franchise and brick-and-mortar businesses. SMBs can show up in maps, above search results, on affiliated websites that opt-into Google’s display ads, and even in pre-roll ads on YouTube. https://searchengineland.com/google-ads-and-smbs-how-to-drive-results-on-a-low-budget-345228

The crawling and indexing processes lay the groundwork for search engines to rank results. Despite being fundamental aspects of how search engines operate, crawling and indexing are often overlooked or misunderstood. During our crawling and indexing session of Live with Search Engine Land, Martin Splitt, search developer advocate at Google, explained these two processes using a simple analogy about librarians.

“Imagine a librarian: If you are writing a new book, the librarian has to actually take the book and figure out what the book is about and also what it relates to, if there’s other books that might be source material for this book or might be referenced from this book,” Splitt said. In his example, the librarian is Google’s web crawler (referred to as Googlebot) and the book is a website or webpage.

“Then you . . . have to read through [the book], you have to understand what it is about, you have to understand how it relates to the other books, and then you can sort it into the catalog,” he said, explaining the indexing process. The content of your webpage is then stored in the “catalog” (i.e., the search engine’s index), where it can be ranked and served as a result for relevant queries.

To bring the analogy full circle, Splitt also described the process in technical terms: “We have a list of URLs . . . and we take each of these URLs, we make a network request to them, then we look at the server response and then we also render it (we basically open it in a browser to run the JavaScript) and then we look at the content again, and then we put it in the index where it belongs, similar to what the librarian does.”

Why we care. For content to be eligible to appear in search results, it must first be crawled and indexed. Understanding how crawling and indexing work can help you resolve technical SEO issues and ensure your pages are accessible to search engines.

Category: Uncategorized

Google Ads and SMBs: How to drive results on a low budget

What is Google Ads? How does it work?

How do small businesses use Google Ads?

How Google crawls and indexes: a non-technical explanation [Video] Google’s Martin Splitt provides a simple summary of the processes that pave the way for ranking search results.