Lots of our clients are asking us: “Should I use Google Adwords do get more traffic? Will it work for me and should I give it a try?”

And .. to be honest, the answer is: “It depends!” 🙂

The truth is, Adwords is a great way to get quality traffic immediately and we use it quite often (it´s actually one of our favorite traffic sources). However, it´s not for any business?

Over the years we´ve developed a simple 2 step process to check, if Adwords might be a good traffic source for a specific business.

 

Step 1        A Simple Question

First, we recommend you answer a very simple question: “When someone is having this problem your product/service is solving and he is looking for that solution, where is he going to search?”

If your answer is: “Google”, than Adwords might work for you.

Adwords is great for local businesses that solve a

time-sensitive or location-based problem.

Such businesses are for example plumbers, electricians, dentists, lawyers and other service professionals.

For instance, when someone’s sink starts leaking, what do they do? They Google plumbers in their area, right? AdWords is perfect when you offer an on-demand solution like this or when your product / service solves and urgent need.

If your (potential) clients are doing pretty much the same, Adwords would make sense for you.

If you´ve answered the question in Step 1 with “Yes”, it´s time for

 

Step 2         Check the Competition

Here is the problem: Even if you´ve answered the Step-1-Question with “Yes”, Adwords might not be right for your business.

For example, the cost per click might be too high to justify buying Adwords clicks.

Therefore, we recommend you check out if your competitors are already using Adwords. Because, if this is the case, and if they´ve been doing it over a certain period of time, it means that Adwords campaigns work for them AND ARE PROFITABLE!

Because otherwise they wouldn´t keep running those campaigns, right? If it´s not profitable for them, if they are just losing money and never getting a positive ROI, they wouldn´t be doing it month after month.

Therefore, we recommend you check, if your competition has been using Adwords for a few months. We´re using therefore 2 free tools, and we´ll show you step by step how you can do it too.

There is a great free tool out there that´ll do the job, you can find it here: https://www.semrush.com/

Let me give you an example and show you how this works:

Let´s say you´re a dentist in Austin, Texas and you want to check, if Adwords would make sense for you.

Fist, you´ll need to decide which keyword people, who need a dentist would type into Google. Here it´s pretty easy, it would be “dentist Austin Texas” or “dentist Austin tx”.

So, go to SEMrush.com and type in “dentist Austin Texas” (arrow 1) and then hit the “Search” button (arrow 2), just like that:

 

 

Scroll down until you find the “ADS COPIES” section:

 

 

If you are seeing ads in this section, like in our example, that means that your competitors are advertising using Adwords, which is a positive sign.

Next thing you should do is click the 1 advertiser that appears in this section (upper left hand), in our case that would be Austin-Area-Dentist.com

 

After you´ve clicked the link, you can see if they´ve been running Adwords campaign for a longer period (the orange graph), which they´ve done. The orange graph shows that they are running Adwords campaigns since november 2012.

 

 

This is indicates that Adwords is working for them and therefore could work for you as well.

 

Another free tool that you can use to check, if competitors are using Adwords, is SpyFu: http://www.spyfu.com/

The system is pretty much the same, just type in “dentist Austin Texas” (arrow 1) and then do the search (arrow 2).

 

 

On the next site, hit the “Advertiser History” (arrow 1) tab and you´ll find data that´ll show you how often your competitors are running Adwords campaigns.

 

 

If you see that some competitors are doing Adwords campaigns quite often (arrow 2) and keep doing it, its most likely because Adwords is working for them.

So, that´s pretty much it; no rocket science! 🙂 Go and check, if Adwords makes sense for your business and if so, give it a try – you´ll get some traffic 😉

 

One more thing:

If you like this article and think that others might find it valuable, please feel free to share it; email it, share it on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.