SEO brings you “organic traffic,” which delivers to customers who are searching resources that solve their challenges. At the top of the same page that the organic listings appear are both the local SEO results and paid search ads. Paid ads are marked with an advertisement symbol, and people know they are click-us ads that appear on the top of the search page. While these ads are working better than they used to, people still trust the organic listings and the local listings more than they trust paid advertisements. But that does not mean they have no value. For most home care agencies that want to grow, a combination of paid and organic listings is most effective. However, reliance on paid ads only is not a good strategy for sustaining business growth.
The Problem with Ads
Businesses that don’t have good organic website traffic are forced to purchase online ads. You can “rent space” via ads, but they don’t perform as well as valuable resources that appear organically on the page. People know the difference between an organic search return and an ad, and what they consider to be a trusted search result. The best approach is a combination of both organic and paid ad placement. Effective SEO systems allow you to compare whether you should seek organic or paid placement for specific search words.
Selecting the Right Paid Advertisements
The best investments in marketing focus on “owning” the search listings that you can rank for with organic SEO, and then adding in paid ads for search terms and keywords that are too hard to rank for purely with SEO. Paid advertisements should be a targeted solution, or a complementary part of your plan, but not the only approach.
The screen below, with real keyword information, illustrates how an effective software system can help you make these choices.
Notice that the key search term “private duty home care” has about 720 organic searches per month. Other agencies are also seeking to be displayed when people search for this keyword. The third column shows the level of competition on a scale of 1 to 100 (100 is high). For both terms that are shown above, the competition is fairly low, and that means that if you take the steps to provide online content around this keyword there is a good opportunity to be found when people search.
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The fourth column shows what it would cost to purchase this term instead of creating searchable content. These numbers are for each click, and are often referred to as “cost per click” or CPC. The cost for this paid search term, if you were to get 720 clicks per month would be over $3500 per month, and only a small portion of these visits would results in potential customers. And, people don’t just use one search term - they may use one of up to a thousand keywords or phrases to find what they need.
A good balance of SEO and paid search, emphasizing the search terms that you can earn and own organically, is the most effective strategy.
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