A Well-Built Website Will Get You Moving

Having a strong organic website is like owning a sailboat: The boat will take you as far as you want to go, and you don’t have to pay to put gas in it.

If your website is built well, it should rank on the first page of Google for one or more keywords. If you want to rank first on Google for "computer," then you’re biting off too much, but if you are a local service provider, getting ranked in your area should be doable. This brings in website traffic organically and should produce leads that cost you nothing.

On the other hand, having a well-designed Pay-Per-Click (Google Ads) campaign is like owning a speedboat: It can cost a fortune to run, but it goes very fast. And unlike a sailboat, you don't have to wait for the wind to blow.

Landing Pages Help to Target Multiple Keywords

Our websites usually contain a lot of landing pages. This lets us target multiple keywords on Google, multiple locations for the same keyword, or both. On the outer limit, we’ll build websites with dozens of target keywords. These can take weeks or months to begin ranking, and typically not every landing page is a winner, though we never give up.

These landing pages are like the many sails of a tall ship. Each sail catches a little wind, adding up to a lot of horsepower. A website with multiple landing pages will always get more traffic than a one-page site. Although each individual landing page might not get tons of traffic, together they can bring in quite a lot.

Google Ads Can Be Expensive but Effective

When we combine our multi-targeted websites with a PPC campaign with Google Ads, it’s like adding a V-8 engine to the sailboat. We can target dozens or even hundreds of keywords in whatever location we choose. The results are not as hit-or-miss as landing pages; no keywords get left behind. We can power our way to the top of any search ranking.

The downside? Google ads are expensive. Some of my clients spend tens of thousands of dollars on Google Ads. My clients reap a handsome ROI, but it typically takes them many months to get comfortable with that high level of ad spending. Due to this high barrier of entry, most people who start Google Ads on their own end up abandoning them.

So if there is a clear benefit to running Google Ads, why have so many business owners who have tried Google Ads quit using them, and how are others making huge returns on their Google Ads investment?

1. Poor targeting: 

If people start out spending money on Google clicks with a poorly designed campaign, they bring in the wrong traffic, which means they don’t get any good leads, and all the money they spend is wasted. Of course they quit. The keyword lists, ads, and geographical targeting all need to be designed to bring in the right leads. Ascertaining the most effective targets is hard, which is why professional assistance is recommended.

2. No funnel: 

Google Ads bring traffic to your website. (It can also promote products or bring in phone calls, but mostly it’s website traffic.) If the website is not designed to effectively funnel traffic to a contact form, you can have hundreds of website visitors but no leads. If potential customers come to your website and aren’t immediately funneled to their next step in engaging with your business, they’ll check out completely. Again, no ROI means the business owner gives up.

3. Inadequate adjacent keyword targeting: 

There are probably a lot of people searching for your keywords who are not prospective clients. For example, if you sell roofing services, "roofing company" is a great keyword. However, targeting that keyword will bring in people searching "roofing companies that are hiring" and other nominally related queries. That’s not a prospect. Religiously curating your negative keyword list—which we do for you—will make sure you’re getting the traffic you want, and keep you from paying for traffic you don’t need.

4. Ramping too fast: 

Google Ads can help you build traffic in a hurry, but ramp up the budget too soon and you’ll be wasting it on a campaign that isn’t optimized yet. It varies widely from industry to industry, but it can take from a couple of weeks to a few months before your campaign is really ready for you to dial in more than a few dollars of ad spend per day. If you blow up your campaign's budget before it’s optimized, you’ll burn out on Adwords and shut it down for good.



A good baseline budget for Google Ads is $50 per day, but I never start clients there. I want to spend the first few weeks optimizing the campaign on a lower budget so that when we start spending big money, we are sure we’ll get big results.

Google Ads are not for everyone.

If your company is 90% as big as you want it to be, go with a cheaper approach, like letting us use a simple, affordable website to bring in organic leads. These sites are the sailboats I spoke of earlier; they cost very little to operate, and they can take you where you want to go.

That being said, we also build speedboats. If you want to dial up your growth aggressively—and you don’t mind the idea of paying a lot for that growth as long as it’s profitable—then let’s have a talk about Google Ads.