Unless you’ve been saddled with a really unlucky company name, you’ll be top in Google for that search. This is very important, because a large proportion of the people who want to find your company website nowadays just type your company name into Google, rather than type in your website URL in the address bar at the top of their browser. That’s why, if you look at your website stats, the top “search term” for traffic coming from Google is probably your company name.
So if you’re “top in Google” for your company name, why would you also book AdWords ads to appear alongside those search results?
1. You can tailor the message you want to give people. The main (“organic”) Google results on the left will show the “Title” of your home page, and (usually, but not always) the “description tag” you’ve specified for that page. You might not want to, or be able to, use these tags to make marketing oriented claims. But there’s no reason not to show off in the AdWords ad.
2. There’s evidence to show that appearing at the top of Google’s results pages is good for trust and branding. Being top on both sides of the page will only help.
3. Who knows what ad will appear top on the right if it’s not yours? It could be something which sidetracks someone from their original intention, which was to look you up on Google. Putting your own ad up there reduces that possibility.
4. You can send people who click on the AdWords ad to whatever page you want. The main Google “natural results” on the left will take them to your home page. Maybe you have a message or offer you’d like to show them on the way? AdWords can do that.
5. If you’ve got some awful global corporate site with some dreadful “please tell us what country you’re in first” home page, then your AdWords ad, showing just in the UK, can take people straight to the UK “about us” page and avoid losing them along the way through boredom.
6. Your ad will appear on Google’s “Content Network” – i.e the thousands of other sites which run AdWords ads. Your ad will show up on pages with content relevant to your company which may not include links to you otherwise.
7. People mis-spell your company name all of the time. Google may not show your company as the first result if people have spelt it wrong. But you can put up an AdWords ad against all the misspellings you can think of, and catch a lot of people that way.
8. Sometimes, AdWords results appear over the top of the main Google “natural results”, so you may be “top in Google” for your company name, but there’ll be ads above you which might have been triggered by your company name: ads for your competitors, even.
9. Although you’ll pay every time someone clicks on the ad, you don’t pay every time someone sees the ad but doesn’t click on it. And since anyone searching for your company name is a prospect, you’ve passed the prospect a marketing message for free!
10. You can stop your competitors using your company name in their AdWords ads, but you can’t stop them using your name in their keywords. If you type your company name into Google today, perhaps their ads won’t be there next to your company name. But do you want to have to keep checking?
It shouldn’t cost much per click to appear at the top of the Google AdWords list against your company’s name, and if you only do one AdWords campaign, it’s not a bad one to try.
Great points from 1-10. Convincing someone to bid on a term that they rank #1 organically is a tough sell, but I always recommend to my clients that they bid on their own brand terms as a “insurance policy”. This will provide me some additional reasons.
@robert_brady