What is Paid Search Advertising?

All search engines (ex., Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, Ask.com, etc.) have their own paid advertising. Businesses of any size can use and benefit from paid search ads. Pay-per-click, or PPC, involves bidding on keywords and placing ads at the top or sides of search results.

To better understand paid search advertising, we must first understand the search engine results page (SERP). When we type something in a search engine (ex., Google), it responds with a list of web pages that are relevant to the words we typed. This page is the SERP. A big part of that list comprises web pages that Google’s algorithm determined to be the best match for our search. This is also called organic results.

However, we can also see results that appear at the top and sides of the SERP. These are paid search ads, which look similar to the organic results or listings, except they are labeled as ads or Ads. Paid ads or PPCs are powerful because they give the advertisements a prime spot in front of people already searching for the same topics.