Why should I spend money on Google Adwords for my cleaning business instead of just investing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO/Organic)?
We get this question occasionally, so here are 2 unsuspecting reasons:
- You will get leads from Adwords you can’t get anywhere else.
- Adwords is instant and trackable.
How to get leads from Adwords you can’t get any other way.
In a typical Adwords campaign we’ll have somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 to 1000 keywords.
Reasonably you can rank well for 1 to 3 keywords for each page on your website. Which means you would need a website with 150-300 pages of unique content to start approaching the keyword traffic you can reach with Adwords.
More importantly, Google’s data from 2012 indicated that about 20% of online searches were locally focused. In other words, roughly 80% of people will search for a household service like “carpet cleaning” while only 20% will search for “carpet cleaning Pittsburgh PA”.
For a small business to get on the first page of Google for a non-local search like “carpet cleaning” can be really tough depending on the competition.
To get on the first page of Google for 500-1000 keywords is simply not possible.
The only realistic way to reach those potential customers is with Adwords.
The immense value in Adwords Tracking technology.
Adwords is a major part of the online marketing laboratory we setup for our clients. Often, clients will start getting web contacts the very first day because, once we launch Adwords, you can be on the top of Google in a matter of minutes.
In comparison, to rank well for SEO takes months to years.
As far as tracking, there’s no cheaper, faster way to learn what marketing works and what doesn’t than Google Adwords.
Let me give you an example.
Let’s say you want to test a $10 off against a 10% off offer to see which gets you more new customers.
You can (and I highly recommend) you run an experiment on your website where you test the 2 offers against each other to see which one converts more of your website visitors to contacts.
With Adwords, you can do the same thing a lot more quickly.
Let’s say you create 2 different Adwords ads for some closely-matched search terms – one with $10 off and one with 10% off. Let’s say each ad is shown 500 times in 1 week with the $10 off getting 20 clicks and the 10% off getting 5 clicks.
That’s enough information to declare the $10 off ad the winner with 99% certainty.
However, that activity only sent 25 total visitors to your website. Assuming your website has the same Conversion Rate as the Click-Thru-Rate on Adwords, to reach the same 99% statistical significance you’d have to send 600 visitors to your website experiment.
If half of your website visitors are from traffic sources other than Adwords, that’s still 12x more Adwords traffic and 12 more weeks of waiting to come to a conclusion.
Additionally, Adwords can tell you which words, phrases, and headlines your customers respond to much more quickly and effectively than a landing page experiment.
It’s the most powerful marketing tool ever created for small business when you understand how to leverage the vast amounts of data.
