While many of the clients that I meet with may not be sure exactly how online marketing works, they've all heard of Google. Most use Google as their default search engine.

It should come as no surprise that the place where you want to start advertising your Denver small business online is with Google. Googe AdWords to be more specific. Google has by far the highest volume of search. According to a recent report by Efficient Frontier referenced in Search Engine Land, Google receives 75% of all paid search clicks and dollars.

Screenshot of the Google AdWords Signup Page
Most Denver small business owners should start their online advertising activities with Google Adwords

For most Denver small businesses who are advertising online trying to find customers, you're fishing from a small pond. You're searching for a narrow geographic region (just Denver metro) for narrow keyword phrases that relate specifically to your business. In order to maximize your reach, learn the most about your online advertising campaign's potential, and get more clients, you need to be working with Google AdWords.

How Does this Help Me Market My Denver Small Business?

I have used and continue to use the other paid search platforms (Yahoo, Bing). I also use Google's AdSense products to allow ads to appear on other websites. Far and away though, when a Denver small business is just beginning to advertise online, they need to be using Google AdWords. Google Adwords provides the largest reach, which means you'll get more data and have the ability to modify your online advertising campaign to get more clients.

Only after you've mastered your Google AdWords campaigns should you move on to advertising online with different search engines.

The Google AdWords Blog is a great resource for knowing what is going on within the world of AdWords. If you're running an AdWords Campaign, I strongly suggest you subscribe to the Google AdWords blog RSS feed. If you're not using a feed reader, make a point to check out the blog frequently.

This week they announced a rather important change that may affect many Denver small business advertisers. The Destination url that appears in an ad must now represent the full domain name (including the subdomain information). So, for example, if your company website is on a domain that has numerous subdomains (like wordpress.com or blogspot.com), your ad must reflect the subdomain information.

The example below clearly illustrates what has been allowed in the past (top images) that is no longer going to be allowed. The lower image shows how you must modify your ad to reflect the full domain information (including subdomain) for the Destination URL in your ad.

How Does this Help Me Market My Denver Small Business?

This post helps you with marketing your small business in a few ways.

Adwords Blog - If you're a Denver small business advertising with AdWords, I highly recommend that you make the AdWords blog a part of your regular reading. You'll know of any changes to the AdWords advertising platform and it will help ensure that you're spending your advertising dollars effectively.

Denver Domain Name - You'll know that going forward, that you must provide the full domain name in your Google AdWords ads.

Most Denver businesses that have their websites established as part of a subdomain should probably consider getting their own domain name. The expectation of consumers surfing the web is that a company with its own domain is more likely to be professional than a company that gets free hosting space on blogspot.com or wordpress.com

In my previous blog post, I discussed how Colorado nonprofits could take advantage of the Google Grants program. I also mentioned the one major "catch" as I see it with the program - the CPC (cost per click) values are extremely low. If you're a Colorado nonprofit, you may find that the keywords that you're interested in may have a CPC value of greater than the $1 CPC threshhold as laid out in Google Grants. Below, I describe how to use the Google AdWords Keyword tool to figure out if you may wish to pursue the Google Grants program.

How Colorado Nonprofits Can Use the AdWords Keyword Tool

To see if the terms you're interested in may qualify under Google Grants, your CPC must be less than $1. I'm going to now take you to the AdWords keyword tool to see approximately how much you could expect to pay for search terms related to your Colorado nonprofit.

1) Go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

2) Enter search phrases related to your nonprofit

Beginning the Search for Nonprofit Keywords for Google Grants

Here, I'm entering fundraising related keywords as opposed to service related keywords. The problem right now is that there are plenty of people looking for services, but resources are at a premium. A nonprofit could (and should) also enter service related keywords to help to ensure that people that needed their services would be able to find them.

The specific search phrases I entered were:

• nonprofit donations
• homeless donations
• homeless charities

Google will expand upon these search phrases as you'll see on the results screen after you click on the "Get Keyword Ideas" button.

3) Review and Customize Results

We're now at the results page. To be able to really make sense of what we're looking at, we're going to want to modify the results a little bit. The first thing to do is to select "Show All" from the columns option in the upper right portion of the screen results. Next, we'll change the match type to "Phrase" match. Finally, we'll click on the Local Search Volume text so that we can get an approximate idea of search volume for the phrases. These steps are all detailed below.

Modifying the Results Page in the AdWords Keyword Tool So It Makes More Sense

4) One Last Tweak

Looking at the results the way they are now, what we're seeing isn't very encouraging. What we'll want to look at first is the CPC column and the Search volume columns (both highlighted below). All of the competitive search terms have CPCs of way over $1 - which exceeds the maximum amount allowed for Google Grants. Fortunately, there still is hope. The CPC results as they are currently displayed are for ad positions 1-3 - the most competitive ad positions on a search engine results page. These ad positions are typically at the very top of the page.

Keyword Results Aren't Encouraging, But Are For High Ad Positions.

Let's see what happens if we adjust our CPC to $1 (as shown below) and recalculate the results.

Keywords Which Were over $1 for positions 1-3 are all under $1 for positions 4-6. These represent a great opportunity for a free, nonprofit advertising campaign.

What A big difference! The same keywords that were well over $2, and in some cases $3 for positions 1-3 are under $1 for positions 4-6 according to the keyword tool. That means that these keywords would be eligible for Google Grants as part of an AdWords campaign. Positions 4-6 on a search engine results page are still great ad positions and will appear on the first page of search results. They won't be as high up on the search engine results page, but they still have a chance to build brand recognition and bring in donations for your Colorado nonprofit.

Quick Caveat

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is just that - a tool. Google doesn't publish exact search volumes for given phrases or exact CPC values. When you start working on AdWords campaigns, you'll notice that the data Google provides through its keyword tool won't exactly match what you experience as an advertiser. Use this tool as a guide to determine what keywords may fit in under that $1 CPC Google Grants requirement to bring in donations to your Colorado nonprofit.

How Does this Help Me Market My Colorado Nonprofit?

In a tough economy, nonprofits have more people utilizing their services, and less donations to support this additional demand. Google Grants is a great way to get a ton of free advertising for your Colorado nonprofit - up to $10,000/month. But, there are restrictions with Google Grants as far as how expensive your keyword phrase is. By using the techniques detailed in this blog post, you can figure out ways to effectively solicit donations - or promote your services online for free using Google AdWords.

I was reading a recent article in the Denver Business Journal about Denver area nonprofits. Not surprisingly, demand for services offered by nonprofits is increasing, while resources available to the non profits is decreasing.

Google Grants: Free Advertising for Colorado Nonprofits

If you are a Colorado nonprofit, there is some good news. You can receive up to $10,000 per month in free Google advertising with their Google Grants program. The major downside I see with the program is that the CPCs (cost per click) must be $1 or less. Often times, these terms are extremely non-competitive - and the keywords that your nonprofit may bid on may not be eligible based on CPC alone. In a future post, I'll describe how nonprofits can see whether or not their targeted keywords would fit in for this $1 or less CPC eligibility requirement.

Is my Colorado Nonprofit Eligible for Google Grants?

Be sure to check out the Google Grants Guidelines for the details, but here are some of the highlights.

• You must have a website, ads must link to a page on your website
• Keywords you target must be relevant to your programs and services
• Website can't display Adsense or related revenue generating ads
• On-going active management of your campaign is your organization's responsibility once active
• Your organization must have 501 3(c) status

More Details about the program:

• Google has around 4,000 people currently involved with Google grants
• Typical Grantee receives around $300 worth of advertising per month
• You can receive up to $10,000 per month in free advertising
• Downside - bids are limited to $1 cpc - which is very low

According to the latest data from ComScore, Microsoft's Bing search engine received the largest increase in total share in search for the month of November. Bing received approximately 9.9% of all search queries in October, this increased to 10.3% in November. Google saw a smaller share increase - 65.4% to 65.6%. Meanwhile, Yahoo continued its slide - falling to 17.5% from 18% in October. For the October numbers, please see my earlier blog post.

Mostly Good News for Bing

This obviously is mostly good news for Microsoft as more people were likely using the search engine for doing their holiday shopping. The downside is that this increase in numbers for using the Bing search engine comes at the expense of Yahoo. Given that visitors to the Yahoo.com properties will soon be using the Bing search engine, the preferred outcome for Microsoft would be for the increase in Bing market share to come at the expense of Google. That hasn't happened - at least not yet.

How Does this Help Me Market My Denver Small Business?

It is always good to have competition in the marketplace to keep costs down. In this case, as a Denver small business owner, competition among the major search engines will help to keep ad costs down. Google pretty much dominates the search market, and unless more competition for search ads emerges, the price to advertise on Google will continue to rise. Bing gaining in market share is good news - but it would be better news if search was more evenly divided among the search engines.

Denver Small Business advertisers should still focus their efforts on Google AdWords first to get the most data and results to base decisions on. If you're doing a significant volume with Google AdWords, then you'll probably also want to run essentially the same campaigns on Microsoft AdCenter as well.