Most people consider Google Adwords as just another way to advertise online. Albeit true, there is a large amount of knowledge to be gained by running even a simple, low budget Adwords campaign. Not to mention the advantages it can have for your organic search engine ranking efforts.

This article will focus on the primary advantages affecting search engine marketing but it is first important to understand why pay per clicking has become so popular in the past two years.

"Perhaps the number one advantage of using Google Adwords is researching, identifying, testing, and selecting what keywords will not only drive traffic, but will drive sales as well."

The main complaints about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) voiced by both marketers and website owners is time and effectiveness. It can often take weeks, in some cases months to create optimized pages that contain relevant content, submit and have it included and indexed, and then create link strategies to up relevance and popularity score. Once indexed, there are no guarantees that you will be included, that you will rank for the keywords you are attempting to targeted, or even that successful rankings will bring in traffic and if that traffic will convert to sales. With billions of websites, the odds are against you even with some of the best optimization experts and the largest, most popular sites. (Not to mention the expense of hiring a search engine optimizer.)

With dynamic sites, RSS/XML technology, SSI (includes), shopping cart systems, database driven data streams, and a number of other forms of interactive technology increasingly used on web sites, not all websites are the flat, clean blog-style or static HTML formats where pages can be individually optimized. Especially with graphically intensive or Flash sites, optimization must circumvent the design in order to both please the engines and aesthetically please the visitor.

The more complex the format of a site the harder it can be to optimize, if at all. For many site owners, organic SEO is not an option. Programmers and designers don't always have search engine spiders in mind when creating sites, and SEO's are rarely consulted during the construction of a website. Therefore, online advertising such as pay per clicking is the only direct way to gain search engine traffic.

Working with clients has taught me that what a site owner considers a keyword is in most cases, rarely what a potential client will type into a search box. Perhaps the number one advantage of using Google Adwords is researching, identifying, testing, and selecting what keywords will not only drive traffic, but will drive sales as well. Knowing what keywords will drive your sales directly helps your organic SEO efforts. These keywords and phrases will be different for every site, and when you change, redesign, or update your site they may change again as well. It is important to balance both the volume of traffic as well as your highly targeted traffic as a means for finding new audience, building relevance for your niche, and maintaining a dedicated audience.

Volume can be a tricky concept. Consider the complaints of most TGP/MPG marketers. "TGP'ers" often state that there is high traffic but low conversions and the largest expense is bandwidth. Take this general fictitious scenario:

You have a Movie Gallery page featuring 3MB of content. 3000 visitors view your movies each day. 1 Gig is 1024MB, so you use a little under 9G. Your hosting company charges $3/Gig. Those 3000 visitors cost you $27 in bandwidth. You make 5 sales; 3 are $3.95 trials and 2 are regular $20 signups, earning you 50%. Your profit for the first month is $25 costing you $2 for the campaign. Over a week it ends up costing you $14. In a month, $60. Odds are you can make it up in recurring sales; however that's a lot of overhead for a slim margin.

Search engine traffic is not only known to convert better than other types of traffic, it is proven. Why? Targeted traffic. People know what they want, they find it, and they buy it. It's as simple as that.

There is nothing more frustrating for a SEO than to hear a client say they want to rank for the word "sex". Targeting general keywords is not the best route to take for SEO or PPC campaigns, and doing a test in an Adwords campaign will teach you that fast. With daily budget caps to help you control your spending in place, Google works to help prevent you from blowing your budget all at once.

Let's take the $60 we spent above in our TGP/MGP scenario above and apply it to an Adwords campaign rather than a bandwidth bill. We set a budget for $2.00 per day. Our minimum cost per click (CPC) is defaulted at $.05 and we set the max CPC at $.15. We select 2 keywords for our solo-girl "babe" site named "Britney Flowers". The first is a general keyword "sex", the second is a more targeted phrase "nude babe".

A destination URL is setup for each keyword so you can track conversions. At the end of the month you received 400 hits. "Sex", which was never displayed very high due to volume and the generality of the search itself, brought 1 trial conversion at $3.95. "Nude Babe" did not have as much competition and because they target keyword closely matched the site being advertised, performed well. Because the CTR was good it received good placement and brought 4 trials at $3.95 and 5 monthly sales at $20. Your profit is just shy of $60. The following month of recurring is pure profit.

Now that we have scratched the surface with some scenarios (results are guaranteed to vary) we will continue in part two by further going into how to more thoroughly target and test keyword performance using Google Adwords. What are broad, general, and phrase search matches and how do they affect performance? How can you make sure you are getting the most traffic at the lowest cost per click possible? What is the difference between search and content match? And finally...how can Google Adwords directly impact you organic results besides helping you pick effective keywords?

Until next time, Happy Promoting!

** Click Here For: Adwords Advantages! - Part #2