Google AdWords Head Thrash!

Considering the pearls of web and tech geekery that are often spouted on this forum I was hoping I might be able to get some objective and simple guidance on google adwords here?

The story so far...
We have just finished an overhaul of my lady partners wedding photography website and are embarking on getting her google rating up. Obviously the first port of call is SEO and what not, but being a photography site an all we don't want to compromise the style by filling it with text.
Prior to now we have been using a webdesign/management company who were charging around £500 a month to ensure we were the featured link on a whole host of search terms.
Now, I always have the suspicion that these guys were a bunch of pisstakers, and when they "lost" our site and we had a weeks outage we sacked them off sharpish.

We are back online and have a refreshed site hosted elsewhere, but the amount of traffic has dropped off. This is undoubtedly down to the fact that we are not sponsored link anymore so we are setting up our own AdWords campaign..
Man, the shit is complex.

Could anyone give me an idiots guide…?

Or even help me set up a decent campaign for a couple of beers…?

Do you know what keywords you were bidding for when you were with the other company?

That's the majority of the up front work done, if you do... the rest is ongoing optimisation.

You can cap your budget with AdWords, so it'll stop displaying the ad once you've reached your monthly spend. So, no danger of accruing huge debts...

If they had google analytics installed on the site, you should be able to dig out the keywords they were using from that.

Yeah...

I have my list of keywords.
It's the relationship between daily budget and cpc that is doing my head in.

Is there anywhere that indicates the cpc value of keywords...?
At the minute I'm looking at paying about £5 per click. That doesn't sound right to me.

Thanks for the help guys, can you tell I'm really feeling my way through this!

If you're being charged £5.00 a click I can pretty much guarantee that your quality score is very low, which is the measure of how "good" Google thinks your website or landing page is for the search terms that you are advertising on.

You need to group your keywords and campaigns really logically and send traffic to the right pages to get the best quality score.

So how do I make google think the site is better and up my quality score...?

Its a photography site so it's really simple.
Gallery/About me/ Contact Form

That kind of site (low word count etc), especially if new, will yield a pretty poor quality / relevance score. I would think about adding some more information to the site which would raise the score.

As Pixpax says; it would certainly make it cheaper to appear alongside the keywords you have identified.

You can't really get a higher quality score because there's very little content on your site.

For example: An AdWords campaign that uses the copy: "Buy some great socks" but then points to www.lfgss.com will get a low quality score compared to: "Find some great fixed gear bike advice" pointing to the same domain. If Google thinks you have a low quality score then you have to pay more (per click) than sites with a good quality score.

You could always go more obscure with your keywords (as your score is low anyway) and target traffic that no-one else is fishing for: "Crazy cat socks" as opposed to "socks", etc.

What text there is is in line with the keywords we are targetting .
Maybe it would help if I outlined the specifics.
his is the website.
www.peacheyphotography.co.uk

Keywords are;
Reportage Wedding Photography
Wedding Photography London
Wedding Photographer London
Wedding Photographer Kent
Wedding Photographer Surrey
Wedding Photographer Sussex
Wedding Photography Surrey
Reportage Wedding Photographer
Contemporary Wedding Photographer London
Contemporary Wedding Photography London

Are you linking to the about us page?

No.
To the homepage.
Is that why...?
Because there is no text on the homepage?

Could be, Google obviously checks the whole site but i would recommend sending it directly to where the information is.

To save some extra cash, you can always select regions / times at which your ads appear. If you only select the regions you offer your services, you will minimise wastage.

Any Google Ads bosses here?

Realised I've never actually advertised what I do and figure it may be worth a crack.

Our site is built with wordpress, originally heavily customised from a template but now nothing much is there from the original source.

I've just set up a pair of smart campaigns (differing content to start testing against each other) and when I type in "x-industry x-location" and see the ad served, what should be a simple 'headline 1, headline 2, headline 3 | description 1, description 2" ad instead serves me:
"headline 1, 2, 3 | description 1, 2 | link to another page that doesn't exist on the site with description I've never written".

I've since learned that smart campaigns seem to do their own testing and will generate content (nightmare fodder if ever there was). And while I can understand generating irrelevant copy, where the fuck are these links coming from? The formatting is ugly as hell and the links are dead - just 404s. The content has never existed on the site so I'm at a loss as to what's going on.

Can you send me your website so I can have a look?

Sorry, no idea how I missed this. Google support claimed it was a feature rather than a fault, obvs :)

I've since built a pair of manual campaigns rather than the 'smart' ones. These show correctly and are getting clicks (some more relevant than others but optimising is part of the fun I guess).

If you need any advice. Gimme a shout.