PPC is not SEO but good SEO can reduce the cost of your PPC and make your budget go further

Did you know that the cost of an advert in Google Ads is directly related to how well your web page matches the search terms you’re advertising for?

It’s true: It’s cheaper to advertise against terms your site is optimised for than terms it is not optimised for.

Why does Google do this? Well, my view is that it’s part of their approach to ensuring that their index, including their paid for listings, are as egalitarian as possible. By ensuring that websites that are highly relevant to a particular keyword or term can advertise against that keyword/term inexpensively, Google are trying to level the field between small or new businesses and the larger, more established players.

There’s also another way of looking at this - it helps Google too.

Google sell answers. Forget every other service they offer, every other project they are involved in, their number one cash-cow that underpins the whole thing is search.

If every time you went to Google to find something, to get an answer, you were inundated with a bunch of irrelevant adverts that took you to websites that weren’t relevant to your query, you wouldn’t be a happy customer. Maybe, if this happened enough, you wouldn’t be a customer at all.

So, by encouraging high relevant sites to advertise, Google is actually improving the quality of the adverts on its site. 

Either way, the effect for website owners is that the better your site is optimised for the keywords that you want to advertise for, the better price you will get per click from Google. 

That’s got to be worth investing some time in.