I often get asked whether doctors and lawyers should do PPC advertising. There are a number of “experts” that say the costs are too high and the competition is just too stiff. They show you lists of keywords with high costs and say that it’s just not worth it when you can do natural listings for free. But what these self proclaimed experts or failed PPC advertisers don’t tell you is that……

PPC has nothing to do with getting lots of traffic for cheap.

The point of PPC is not to get as much traffic as possible, it is to get targeted traffic for the purposes of conversions. Now granted there are a number of different reasons why people start PPC campaigns, they want to show up at the top and aren’t in the natural listings, branding purposes, some can’t afford to pay for optimization services etc. But despite the various different reasons that people start a campaign, the point of any marketing is to get more business. Traffic isn’t necessarily business, that’s where conversions come in. So the when I see a blogger showing a list of keywords and costs, but never addressing the aspect of conversions, it’s a red flag to me that that person is not experienced. A true PPC advertiser knows that the costs associated with PPC, more often than not, are worth the return. How do I know this?

Well, after years of PPC advertising for professionals I have a dozens of examples of clients who weren’t sure that PPC was worth it for them, and were proven wrong. One particular client, a lawyer on the east coast has been doing PPC advertising as a way of boosting their results. Several months back they started to wane on their PPC advertising because they were showing up so well in the natural listings and felt like they no longer needed to do PPC as well. They went through the PPC conversions (emails) and verified how many of those emails translated into business over the past year, and were astounded when they realized they had made $480,000.00 in profit from their PPC advertising, in one year. Now this is only one example, and there are plenty of people out there who will tell you that it’s not worth it to do PPC advertising. But the key is too remember that most people doing PPC are inexperienced and/or using campaign management software. Neither of which commonly result in a return on investment.

So, PPC advertising is most definitely worth it, for any business, professionals included. But, you have to have an experienced person managing your campaign and you absolutely have to be tracking conversions.