“The #1 Secret your Yellow Page Rep and Internet Marketing Tele-Marketers REFUSE to tell you about Marketing Your Business Locally Online”

Do you operate a local business?

Do you have a published phone number?

Well if you have been in business for any length of time you have likely had more than a few calls from folks trying to sell you online search engine marketing.  The fact is that most if not all of the companies who are soliciting you for online marketing are doing so because they are selling “sponsored advertising” or what’s known as PPC (pay per click) advertising.

If you have been in business for more than a year or two they you have likely forged one of those awkwardly uncomfortable relationships with a yellowpage directory sales rep. who you know only meets with you every year for the sole intent of seeing how much commission they can earn off of you this time around.

Well, due to rapidly shrinking print directory revenues even their new game is to offer online marketing in the form of PPC campaigns.  It’s actually a great move on their part because i) most business owners don’t know the first thing about marketing their business online and ii)  PPC is a way for them to do what they know how to do best …write you into a contract that has you give them money each and every month for something that will go away if you stop paying for it.

But what your yellow page rep and all these other online marketing solicitors fail to tell you is that there is a far more powerful – and MUCH LESS EXPENSIVE – way to market your business online.

It’s called “Organic Search Traffic” and the fact is…

Organic Traffic is KING!

Now let me show you why.

Side note: For the super sceptical I’m not completely discounting paid traffic, it still has an important place for things like keyword research – but it’s place should be considered very limited and short term.

There are 2 main reasons I believe that organic search engine ranking traffic is where local businesses should be focusing their attention:

1)       Organic Traffic is Growing while Paid is Declining

2)       Organic Traffic is PERPETUAL

 

Reason #1. Organic traffic is growing and paid is declining

Let me illustrate with this image:

You see how the clicks are distributed on a search engine results page?

If you are a #1 paid advertiser, you are lucky to get 3% of the traffic! For the sake of the argument and to keep it fair, let’s double the number. So that means out of every 100 visitors to a particular result page, you might get 6 to click on your ad. And what if you are not in #1 advertising spot? Your chances go down dramatically.

But it wasn’t always like this.

When Google AdWords (i.e. PPC sponsored links) first came on the scene, clicks on the sponsored links were through the roof!  In fact, most Google users didn’t know there was a difference between the organic listings on the left and the paid listings on the right, so by some estimates the paid listings received as much as 30% of the clicks.  By 2008 this number had dropped to 10.5% according to Enquisite.com and was down to 7.5% at the end of 2009.  And this trend has continued as more and more people realise that these listings are by and large leading to paid sales pages.

The main point here is that the searcher is being conditioned by their experiences to click on the natural, “organic” search results and the first organic spot actually gets anywhere between 41% and 45% of those clicks on average. The second spot gets about 11%-18% (…and that’s still a full 10 to 20 times higher than the #1 paid listing!!)

So what about lower organic search engine ranking results – PPC at the very least beat them, right?

Well not quite…

Here’s a screen shot of the numbers:

Now certainly these numbers vary depending on what source you reference and the search category but the consensus is the same: “ANY first page organic SEO traffic spot beats any PPC spot” and by a significant margin I would say.

 

Reason #2. Organic Traffic is PERPETUAL

This point is significant and one that most “sponsored advertising” sales reps hope you never really figure out.

The fact is the internet is by its design a “content network” and good content never really goes away.  The better and more relevant your content is to the searcher, the more likely it is to always show up in their natural search results. And done properly, that content becomes cumulative so that with each new optimized piece of virtual subject matter it builds upon the authority of everything that you currently have online and boosts those results even more.

Because of this cumulative effect along with the significantly higher click through rates means that investing in effective SEO (search engine optimization) to achieve solid organic rankings will;

1.      cost you significantly less,
2.      generate much higher ROI’s and
3.      produce many times more prospects and customers for years and years to come

So what are the marketing takeaways here??

If you are new to internet marketing take my advice, keep your money and forget about the telemarketers and yellowpage reps PPC products.

PPC competition is fiercer than ever, ad costs are getting high and higher, Google’s ‘quality score’ ranking is irrational and the volume of traffic available is shrinking every year = not a very wise investment!

If you have even a basic understanding of marketing you would have to agree that you need to go where the traffic goes, and that’s away from paid advertising and back to organic searches.

Take ownership of your traffic and claim all the clicks that your PPC competitors are leaving on the table.

If you need any suggestions or help to improve your organic search rankings don’t hesitate to contact me, we have lots of resources and strategies to help any local business rank well online, generate LOTS more business and save money.

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