I've found that from time of submission to Google to time of appearance in the search engine can take upwards of 6 weeks. Sometimes it is much shorter, and sometimes a little bit longer. There is not a lot you can do about this as a website owner - Google is an independant company and makes no claims about how long it will take, or even if, your website will feature in search results.
However, Google provides another way of getting onto the front page of the search results, and it is called 'Google AdWords'. AdWords is an implementation of a pay-per-click advertising model, where they show ads for free, and only charge the advertiser when someone clicks on the ad. The ads themselves are only 4 lines of text, so as a user, you really do have to click on them to find out more information.
Most people using Google (and that is about 80% of us, apparently) are aware of AdWords advertising - the familiar column of ads down the right hand side of the Google Search results which are related to the search terms entered.
How it Works
The advertiser creates an 'account' at Google AdWords, and creates one or more 'ads'. The ad consists of 4 lines of text, a link to a website and some keywords defining what the ad relates to. Only the 4 lines of text are displayed - the link and the keywords are hidden from the end-user.
When a visitor goes to the Google website and types in a search term, Google scans through it's list of ads that match their specified keywords with the search terms entered. From that set of ads that match, it chooses which ones to display and them lists them from top to bottom next to the search results. The ads are clearly marked as 'Sponsored Links' to differentiate them from the 'organic' search results.
And that's not all - Google also has a massive network of 'partner' sites in the Google AdSense network. These are sites that have signed up with Google to have Google AdWords advertisements displayed on their sites. The owners of the partner sites get a commission from Google every time someone clicks on one of the ads, which, naturally, comes out of the advertisers pocket. Thus a lot of sites are keen to sign up for AdSense to generate more revenue from their website. The ads are displayed when the content of the partner site page matches the keywords of the AdSense ads. So sites displaying information about horse riding are likely to have ads for websites selling saddles and horse feed. All this is done automatically and the partner site has little or no say in what ads get shown on their website, which can often lead to the curious situation where a website is advertising it's competitor.
How Much is It?
Astute readers will have picked up the line in a previous paragraph 'Google chooses which ones to display'. This is where the pricing comes into it. As an AdWords user, you 'bid' on each of the ads that you create. This bid is the amount you are prepared to pay 'per click' to get someone onto your website. The bids range from about 10 cents per click to several dollars, depending on the keywords used.
Generally speaking, the highest bid gets the top spot, although other factors do come into play.
You can create a daily or monthly limit so that you don't spend more than a set amount on advertising, no matter what your bid price. Or you can 'always be top bidder' and get the top spot regardless of the cost. You can start from as little as $30 a month, or spend as much as you like! It's up to you to decide how much you want to spend on acquiring new customers.
Does it work?
Because it is paid advertising, it might be tempting to think that it doesn't work, because people tend to go for the search results rather than the ads. In general, this is probably true, but you have to look at the numbers involved. With over 100 million people exposed to the Google AdWords network daily, even the tiniest sliver of people looking for your product or service can turn into a lot of visitors to your website. It can quickly generate a lot of traffic for well chosen keywords and a snappy ad text.
What's the best strategy?
There are a lot of different strategies, but the best one is one that sets out to accomplish a clear objective. You should have a clear objective for the AdWord campaign, or you may just generate a lot of visitors but no extra sales.
I recommend a 4 step strategy to get the most out of AdWords
1. Define a clear objective to achieve, such as promoting a particular product or service, generating more enquiries about a particular product or service, or selling more of a particular product or service. The reason to be specific is that when people are searching on the internet, they are searching for something specific, as opposed to a newspaper reader, who is taking in the news and affairs and happens to look at advertisements as well. If your ad is a formulated response to the exact question people are asking, chances are you'll get a click.
2. Find or create the exact spot on your website that relates to the objective. If it is a special offer, you should have a page or section on your website which relates to that specific offer. That way, when the user clicks onto your website, they are delivered right into the information they are seeking. Supermarkets get away with putting the milk and bread at the back of the store to make us walk past all their other products to get our essentials, but websites have a lot more competition and can't get away with the same tactics. The website should have a relevant page, whether it is a product listing, a press release copy about a new product, or the details of how to enquire about a specific service.
3. Do some research into keywords. Find out the keywords that people are using to search for products. This is where your site log comes in handy. You'll already have had visitors coming in from search engines looking for specific products. By reviewing your site log you'll see what people use to search with. It will often be different to what you, as the owner of the product or service, would use yourself. Try out keywords in Google to see what ads come up. If you can find a set of keywords that you know people use, but produce little or no AdWords listings, even better.
4. Create your ad and monitor, monitor, monitor. Creating the ad only takes about 20 minutes and is the easiest step of the process. However, monitoring the success of the ads is the most important thing to watch. AdWords provides comprehensive monitoring tools to see how your ads are performing in the ratio of the number of times it is shown to the the number of times it is clicked on (the Click-through-rate or CTR) and other measures, but it can't tell you if those people are buying, enquiring or just leaving once they get to your site. You need to see what people are doing once they come onto your site, and whether or not the ad seems to be working, and this is done via the site log. You can also assign each ad a unique identifier, so that you know which visitors came from which ad, allowing you to weed out the underperforming ads and concentrate on the winners. You may be getting people in who find the result they get on your website is not what they expect. Or you may find that your product isn't competitively priced. But rarely will you find that the person mistakenly clicked onto your site. 99% of all the visitors from a Google AdWords ad were looking for whatever your advertisement said, and you should critically examine how your Website answers the question they were asking.
Interested? Well, go ahead and get started...
I have added a new how-to document into the iFinity knowledgebase, which explains step-by-step the process for creating and running a Google AdWords campaign. This goes into strategy a lot deeper, and gives hints, tips and tricks on getting your ad as targeted and relevant as possible.
The Google AdWords website (http://AdWords.google.com) is also has extensive reference material for answering most of your questions. However, you won't get much strategy advice here, because I think Google likes people to make mistakes and learn from them, because while you are learning they are earning!
I have also added in a new how-to document on tracking pay-per-click advertising (like Google AdWords) with your iFinity-supplied website using the Vendors and Affiliates feature.
The documents are available here, but you'll need to sign into the iFinity website (use the login link at the top right) first in order to access them. If you don't know your login and password email me and I'll send them to you.
Next time I'll cover off strategies on improving the all-important Google search engine ranking, an area that is quickly changing as Google has been playing with it's search algorithms. I have seen the top ranking in several search terms change places recently, so something is afoot at Google HQ. But change can spell opportunity, so I'll post again when I have some more information.