If you are a small business owner, then it is time to consider the best marketing strategy for your company. The two most popular strategies that small businesses use are PPC and SEO.
Should you use PPC or SEO for your business marketing?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is an amazing way to promote your website and get it ranked higher on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. An amazing benefit of SEO is it is evergreen. Rankings in local Maps and organic will have business coming in even after the SEO work has stopped. If not continued however, business will eventually slow down because the competition will most likely also be doing SEO for their business. If you stop, a competitor can over take you in the rankings.
A major consideration when deciding if SEO is right for your business-marketing plan is to understand that SEO takes time. It is a long-term investment and digital marketing strategy. The typical expectation to see results from a SEO strategy is 6 to 12 months depending on the market and competition level. Therefore, a business owner would have to determine if their business needs results now, or if established enough and can wait for the SEO results to kick in. Managing your expectations is important here.
Choosing the right company to do your SEO is important as well. If SEO is performed incorrectly, then search engines may penalize the companys website, which will cause their rankings to drop or even worse – disappear completely, can penalize companies! For this reason, SEO should be combined with other forms of online marketing such as PPC (pay per click) advertising, which drives traffic directly from specific websites like Facebook or Twitter onto the company website.
PPC (Pay Per Click)
PPC stands for Pay Per Click and is for businesses that need or want customers more rapidly. When a business uses PPC, they are only paying for their ads to show up on the search engine results page. Google Adwords is one of the most popular and effective Pay Per Click platforms in use today. You can set your budget by cost per click or how much you want to spend over a campaign period, such as daily, weekly, or monthly.
A business owner must determine if their business needs customers right away and they have the budget for PPC. Pay Per Click can be expensive when starting, because the campaign has to “warm up”. It needs data in order to be able to tweak it and find the right keywords for your business. If this is not done correctly the budget could be lost paying for keyword clicks that are not relevant to the business.
Some business owners attempt to do their own PPC campaign management. That is fine if they have the time and most of all the experience with PPC. It is not ideal marketing approach for beginners to try to do PPC themselves.
PPC marketing is great for when you want to have immediate customers, but are on a budget. SEO takes time and patience as it can take months or years before someone will find your business online through search engine results pages. PPC campaigns usually cost more money than SEO campaigns because they require bidding in advertising spaces from different third parties.
PPC and SEO: The Ideal Solution
The best solution, if the business has the budget for it is to combine both PPC and SEO together. The benefit is the business will get an almost immediate influx of new business customers while the SEO work is being done and will provide results in the long term. This one, two, combination of paid advertising and search engine optimization provides both short term and long business growth and is the ideal situation for businesses.
The key to having success with both PPC and SEO is to work with a reputable company, such as Home Service Direct, that provides both SEO and PPC management. The wrong company can potentially blow the PPC budget and get the company’s website penalized. If this were to happen, it could devastate a business for a long term.
