Whether you are a seasoned veteran or a new fish in the sea, getting your content seen is the most inportant factor in converting sales.  As we mentioned in an earlier post on the sales conversion funnel, successful websites are designed to direct traffic from offsite to an onsite sale.  To do this effeciently, your website needs to be full of conversion points without looking spammy, and you need a plan to bring in new traffic from search engines and social media channels.

This applies to both retailers and direct sales websites equally, and both have the same challenge of getting traffic to their sites.  Hands down the most powerful tool for finding your customers and converting them to a sale is Google’s AdWords.

AdWords, for those who aren’t familiar, are those “sponsored links” you always see on the top and right sides of a Google search page.  These are not organic listings, but instead people have bid a specific amount to appear in these locations whenever you type in a matching search query.  While this alone sounds pretty powerful, the true revenue generating power of AdWords is found in their keyword tool.

Remember long tail keywords from our beginners guide to SEO? Now that you have your site optimized for them, you can use Google’s AdWords tools to now drive that traffic from search engines, and weed out the people who are just browsing around.

Lets say for example you are selling  high quality custom log furniture on your website and you want to try and reach more customers. The goal with AdWords is to find long tail “buying keywords” that are specific to your products, and to avoid the highly searched keywords as these will have a much lower conversion rate.  So for example having your ads show up when people search “furniture” might get you a lot of impressions, however you are more likely to convert a sale from someone who searched “custom log furniture.”