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For tuition agencies that want to promote themselves online and don't have much of a budget, Google AdWords can be a great way of ensuring your site appears on Google's first page for some of the crucial search phrases. You can spend as much or as little as you like on AdWords because it operates on a pay-per-click model and you're only charged when a user clicks your ad. Here are our top tips for implementing a successful AdWords campaign.
Choosing Your Keywords
You should think carefully about which keywords you want your ad to appear under. The words you decide upon are those that your ad will appear under in search results. The more popular the keyword, the more expensive the cost-per- click of appearing under those searches. You'll likely want to choose keywords relating to your brand and the tuition industry in general. The more specific your keywords, the effectively you'll be able to target your audience. For example, rather than choosing ‘private tutors London', you may want to choose ‘tutoring agencies London' as you know your audience will be specifically looking for agencies rather than individual tutors. These shorter tail keywords can have high costs per click, due to there being lots of competition so you should also try to target some long tail keywords as well using longer sentences or phrases. People often search using several different combinations of words, so make sure you have those covered too. Phrases like 'how to choose a tutoring agency' are usually particularly effective. You can use the keyword planner within the Adwords interface to help you find more keywords when you're stuck for ideas.
Target Your Audience Geographically
Google AdWords also enables you to appear under searches that that relate to a specific area. For example, if your agency is based in Central London and you only tutor within this area, you probably don't want to appear in results relating to Cambridge. You can target your audience based on postcode, city or by choosing a specific radius around your local area, e.g. within 5 miles of Central London. Geotargeting your AdWords campaign is a clever way to improve your conversion rates and ensure that people who click through to your site are actually interested in using your agency's services.
Device Targeting
The future of online marketing is device targeting and things are no different with Google AdWords. With AdWords, you can adjust your bids depending on whether a search has been carried out on desktop computers or laptops, mobile devices or tablets. Bid adjustments can be made within campaigns to prioritise which devices are more valuable. It is important to keep in mind the direction in which the search market is moving. This is currently towards mobile. Indeed, as shown in the following graph, the percentage of web search on tablets and smartphones has been appreciably increasing by 5 and 3,5 per cent respectively, in 2013.
Remember that with Google AdWords, you only spend as much as you want. You're able to set your budget per day, which can be as little as £1. AdWords can be a good introduction to paid advertising and is a low risk way of discovering whether paid advertising will work for your agency.
What are your experiences of using Google AdWords for your tutoring agency? Do you have any success stories you'd like to share with our readers? What other tips do you have for agencies considering using AdWords for the first time? Please leave your comments below.
