Google and Cariad share the love

At Cariad we’ve always loved Google and worked to its exacting standards to deliver great results for our clients. Recently though we decided it was time to make our mutual love-in official.

We therefore despatched our SEO expert Ryan Davies and digital marketing guru Emma Perrott to Google headquarters to sit two challenging exams in Google AdWords. As we knew they would, they both passed with flying colours and thanks to their sterling efforts we are now an official Google Partner. For the uninitiated this means we are now an accredited and trusted business partner of Google.

Emma and Ryan showcased their skills and knowledge acquired working with our clients on PPC (pay per click) advertising. In addition to sitting exams they received additional training from Geddy van Elburg, a leading expert on PPC, who taught them advanced techniques for running successful AdWords campaigns.

AdWords is a fantastic tool for driving high quality traffic to a website and even though it is paid for, Google constantly monitors its performance and if it deems it is not of a high enough quality in terms of keywords and links it will get dropped down the rankings and earn a poor quality score. This is why it is essential that those running an AdWords campaign know what they are doing and how to achieve the best results from it.

One of the advantages of AdWords advertising is that it is completely measurable. We can monitor it on an hour by hour basis and if it is not delivering exactly what the client wants we can stop it, pause it or change it.

Despite what many people believe, AdWords advertising does not need to be expensive and the client can control exactly how much they wish to spend. A good marketer will target a campaign effectively and economically and both Ryan and Emma are now even better versed in the finer details of keywords, links, budgets, timing and location.

Despite its effectiveness though both Emma and Ryan stress the importance of not investing your entire online marketing budget on PPC. “It needs to be part of a wider online strategy,” explains Emma. “It is still important to run a really strong SEO campaign alongside content marketing, email marketing and social media.”

Another benefit of our partnership is that as a team we have access to ongoing support from Google – the downside for Emma and Ryan is that to keep up to date and maintain our accreditation they have to retake their exams every year! A small price to pay I think!