How to guide: Google search

Google search. Your name number 1.

Search for your name in google. What do you get? Other people? Random stories? Search my name and what do you see at the top of the results? Aaron Lamb, Writer. It’s a search ad and it costs me less than $10 a week. That’s what you want too!

This is the introduction to the basics.

Step one. Set up a Gmail account. It’s free and it takes a couple of minutes.

Step two. Go to adwords.com

This is where all of the search ads are built. This is where you have your name as an ad.

Step three. Set up a campaign

ON the left tab, you’ll see a button for campaigns. Click or tap that, and you’ll see this:

Now hit that blue circle with the white plus symbol and select New Campaign and you should see this:

There are A LOT of options here, but we are going to keep this simple. Select the first one Search Network, then select website traffic. The other options are for an advanced campaign. Now enter your website URL in the box and hit continue.

You should see this screen:

Campaign name is just something for you so you know what your campaign is. You can call it My Name, or Branded Search. Whatever makes sense to you. Then hit yes to add the display network. You’ll get seen in more places!

Now scroll down the page until you get here:

This is the part that will spend your hard earned cash. You can select manual or automatic bidding. My advice would be automatic. If your name happens to be the name of someone who is famous then you’d want to do some more advanced work and you’d pick manual.

For now automatic will do until you become a famous writer.

Now enter in an amount you’d be happy to spend a day. Please note that unless you have lots of people search for you already you might not reach that amount. For instance, if one click costs $1 and you have 2 people clicking but your budget is $10, then you’ll only spend $2! Cost Per Click is what it’s called. You pay for the clicks.

Site links, extensions and call outs are all worth doing, but I’ll cover those in a more advanced post.

Congrats. That’s the campaign setup.

Now it’s time for your ads.

The adgroup is the group of adverts under the campaign. For instance, this adgroup in my campaign might be Aaron Lamb. Another ad group might be Aaron Lamb Writer or Author Aaron Lamb.

For now let’s just stick to your name.

I’ve filled in a sample for you.

It’s important to use “” and [ ] as these help google understand the search behavior of people and ultimately will cost you less per click.

Now scroll down and hit save and continue, then hit the box that says new ad.

Finally, you get to have some fun!

This is the ad that people will see if they search your name. This is the screen you should see:

You have character limits, so the best thing to do here is trial and error. You’ll see the auto-preview on the right so you’ll have a good idea of how your ad looks.

Google likes to see a few variations so it can test what works best for you so at the top of the page hit the new ad button when you’ve finished your first and do two variations on it. Hot save and continue when you are done. Here’s a sample: