Stop Overspending on Google Ads

For many small businesses, getting on the first page of Google is their primary marketing strategy. However, there’s so many more ways to generate traffic to your website at lower costs.

The current, unfortunate, plan we often see is to hire a marketing agency who immediately puts you on a 12-month contract and runs paid ads on Google and Facebook. The statistics have lately shown that this approach generates a very low return on investment. You end up working just to pay Google for their ads. That’s not a great business model for your business, or your retirement.

Yes, getting qualified leads through your internet presence should be a primary marketing focus. But the market has changed and these online paid clicks have become much less productive.

The easiest, cheapest and most productive thing you can do is to fully optimize the website for your target market and products. Done correctly, the search engines will organically (free) rank a particular webpage high, especially for local search results.

If done correctly, this only has the one-time cost of optimizing the page and it then lasts forever, with no recurring costs. You can slowly build these very niche pages over time and your site will generate more and more traffic.

Google, and others, offers free SEO tools to check compliance.

Also, the website needs to meet the current Google (and others) Webmaster Guidelines. Not being compliant causes your ‘trust factor’ to drop, pushing down you search rankings. Again, this is a one-time set up and will last until Google changes the rules again. Usually every 3 – 5 years. Then, it may need to be updated again, But that’s usually just some minor update work.

So, why don’t most small businesses do this? Because their marketing agency can’t make much money on this relatively small project. Instead, they want the year long contract, with paid ads.

While there definitely are times to run paid ads, it’s usually for very niche, or super competitive keyword queries. Unfortunately, I see companies paying for clicks for their own company name. If your company is XYZ Plumbing, it should rank in first place for a search for XYZ Plumbing. Why pay $10- for a click when you are already ranked # 1. But, that’s what I see marketing companies do. And Google is very good at suggesting additional, often irrelevant, keywords. The marketing companies like to show how much traffic the paid ads are generating.

The test I recommend it to pause ALL paid ads for 45 days. Then, look at your analytics reporting. Are you getting organic, free traffic for keywords that you were paying for? I’ve taken paid advertising accounts from $2,000- per month to less than $100- and the traffic has not significantly dropped.

Also, in our years of experience with small local business marketing, there’s another issue that rarely gets addressed; the follow thru, sales funnel process from the business.

I did an optimization project for a small cleaning company and saw a good improvement in their website traffic. However, they complained that they were not getting any results. I kept looking at the traffic numbers and it didn’t make sense. So, I called their phone number, as listed on the website, and immediately went to voicemail. Okay, that’s understandable for a small business, but their voicemail message was a generic ‘You have reached 555-555-5555. We are out of the office, blah, blah, blah…’ It never mentioned the business name. Having thought I dialed the wrong number I hung up and called again, same generic blah, blah, blah. So, I left a message. Got a call back 2 days later from a lady with limited English. When I confronted the business owner with this, he said he was too busy to answer all the calls himself. So, while his website was generating more traffic, he wasn’t managing the sales funnel very efficiently.

First step to success; get the website organically optimized. Second step, respond quickly to incoming inquiries. You will send less money to the search engines and more to your bottom line.