SEO vs. Paid Search: What’s more Important for Local Businesses with Joe Troyer

Joe Troyer  0:39

How would you compare the importance or priority of SEO versus ads for a local business? So I think that ads first and foremost, is a kind of deceiving word. Like what do you mean by ads? Right? Are we talking cold traffic ads? Are we talking warm market ads? Are you talking ads to existing customers? Because for me, all of those ads pay off very differently. Right? Like if we had a scale and we said like ads to current customers, we have ads to prospects.

So their prospects but they're not customers yet, then we got ads to cold market, right? You should be doing these frickin ASAP. Right because this is just only going to help you get more with your current advertising. Right and the cost is going to be jack right? This is retargeting remarketing, everybody in their mothers should be doing remarketing and retargeting. You guys know the cost and the value right that you get out of it. So the great thing about retargeting and remarketing, and these specific types of ad campaigns to is that these are very fast acting, they're very low cost and fast acting. So like, you can get this set up. In terms of tracking, you can get this set up and the campaign creatives done, and everything is set up and running and live.

And let's call it a week, right? And these are going to be up and running and producing and getting impressions from your prospects in a week. This, this is a little bit of a different story, right? Right, like this ROI is going to be like almost instantaneous. This ROI is going to have to be proven, this is going to take some wild a little bit to figure out it's not going to be profitable overnight. Okay, a lot of people, for example, run Google ads, right? A lot of businesses run Google ads, and they run it for a month. And their cost to acquire a customer is really high. But they think that in month one, they're going to be profitable. Right? Like you got to run that thing longer, right so that you understand what campaigns are working and which campaigns aren't.

Which ones are sucking drive the ad spend and which ones are converting like crazy that you should be spending more money on. So these things, let's do that. So say high priority for me, these are these are these are high priority. Let's say then, medium priority. Alright. So medium priority, low priority. So for me, desktop search would be kind of the lowest priority, it's just going to be the least converting, you know, mechanism and mobile gets so much traffic and so much demand like we've talked about.

And it doesn't mean that like I don't want to do it and I'm not excited for it by all means that's a really big channel. There's just other things that I want to do first. So I mean, for me high priority

Joe Troyer 3:51

Let's just say like remarketing ads to current customers, remarketing ads, the prospects in here as well like for me in terms of like high priority is like we got to build out a GMB so that it comes up for branded searches. Like that's frickin high priority. Right and we got to get we got to protect our brand protect the business business's brand with reviews. And the first page of Google and what I mean by that is when you search for the brand on the first page of Google, you should see the GMB pop there should be a good amount of reviews there.

It should be four and a half stars plus on that Google My Business account right? Then you should see Yelp you should see you should see yellow pages you should see Manta you should see better business or the BBB. All four or all five of those sites that I just listed as well all show the the Google review snippet inside of the search so they're all going to show those stars right? You do some some some videos talking about the reputation with rap videos or one of the other platforms out there.

Right You can control the whole first page and people's perception of your brand. Like, those are all high priority, like, those things are gonna get you guys, huge returns. So this is like all for me high priority, easy to implement things. Next up, again, I would have to say then would let's say mobile search campaign to medium priority and mobile search. So I think SEO can either be right can be medium priority or could be low priority. At the end of the day, I think it has to do with what the business owner wants, right? Are they willing to invest now to in the future, have a marketing campaign that potentially has a much, much lower marketing cost? Right? Or do they want results now?

And we'll work on their margin and we'll work on, you know, turning over that same customer four or five times, right, building out an average customer value now. That's the conversation that you have to have with a local business owner, I believe, right, some of them are going to want to do SEO or will make the budget from the beginning.

Some of them won't. Okay, and it also depends on where you advise them to stick their money. Okay, I think that these things are kind of interchangeable, like I would definitely do a mobile search. But in terms of where does SEO go? Like, if we can make their PPC profitable, we're going to build them as super fast growing business, and then we stack SEO on it, and we can really start to get things Uber profitable. Yeah, protect the brand, build the brand, right? And then stack sales on top of it right, like light the fire underneath it.