Why Local SEO Is Important For Your Business
Please note that this blog post is taken from my website. You can find the original here.
Why Local SEO Is Important For Your Business
People ask me “Why local SEO is so important my business ?”
I assume that as you are reading this you already know what SEO is ?
It’s the practice of trying to get your website or web pages to rank high in the search engine results when people search for your type of business or service.
It’s the practice of trying to get your website or web pages to rank high in the search engine results when people search for your type of business or service.
I will go over why it’s important and do a comparison against advertising. When it comes to doing local SEO there’s a couple things to compare it against.
PPC which is pay-per-click advertising namely Google Adwords, a lot of small businesses do Google AdWords but not a lot of businesses invest in SEO and the reason being is advertising easy to get started and it’s easy to see results whereas SEO is a little bit more difficult to get started and when you actually implement it you don’t see the results right away. You may not see results for several months or at least several weeks down the line so it’s kind of hard to figure out what the ROI is and that’s we’re going to talk about.
PPC which is pay-per-click advertising namely Google Adwords, a lot of small businesses do Google AdWords but not a lot of businesses invest in SEO and the reason being is advertising easy to get started and it’s easy to see results whereas SEO is a little bit more difficult to get started and when you actually implement it you don’t see the results right away. You may not see results for several months or at least several weeks down the line so it’s kind of hard to figure out what the ROI is and that’s we’re going to talk about.
PPC Vs SEO
So when it comes to local SEO verses pay-per-click advertising paid online advertising there’s a couple advantages to it:
Number one is people tend to trust the organic search results over ads that show up in the search results. Organic search results tend to get more clicks and people tend to trust those rankings more than the typical advertisements that are above and at the bottom on the search results page.
Number two is it works for you month after month. When you do paid advertising or any kind of advertising as soon as you stop the effort or you stop paying for it everything goes back to zero, there’s no lasting value and there’s no residual value to it other than paying for it. As soon as you stop paying the results stop, when it comes to SEO you make that investment upfront and it may take a while to start seeing results but once you do those results work for you week after week and month after month and sometimes they work for a year after year especially if we continue to do some kind of maintenance with your website. Also with SEO you can start to see results year after year for work that you did months ago or even years ago! Most importantly it provides a better long term ROI over paid advertising.
Number one is people tend to trust the organic search results over ads that show up in the search results. Organic search results tend to get more clicks and people tend to trust those rankings more than the typical advertisements that are above and at the bottom on the search results page.
Number two is it works for you month after month. When you do paid advertising or any kind of advertising as soon as you stop the effort or you stop paying for it everything goes back to zero, there’s no lasting value and there’s no residual value to it other than paying for it. As soon as you stop paying the results stop, when it comes to SEO you make that investment upfront and it may take a while to start seeing results but once you do those results work for you week after week and month after month and sometimes they work for a year after year especially if we continue to do some kind of maintenance with your website. Also with SEO you can start to see results year after year for work that you did months ago or even years ago! Most importantly it provides a better long term ROI over paid advertising.
Why Local SEO Is Important For Your Business
What is my ROI for a SEO service ?
One of the hardest things when it comes to SEO is figuring out what the ROI will be for you. SEO can cost quite a bit of money to start with because it’s time consuming and it can be difficult depending on what industry you’re in to get those rankings. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out the ROI so I’m going to give you an example how you can figure it out.
If you are thinking about going to invest in SEO what kind of return on investment compared to other advertising are you likely to get ?.
Lets say you’re a divorce lawyer in London. Next I would use a tool calledGoogle Keyword planner for this and I take the term ‘divorce lawyer in London’.
On average in London that gets about two hundred and ten searches a month but when you take variations of that term you get over five hundred searches a month.
Variations would be ‘divorce lawyers’ plural in ‘London’ or ‘London divorce lawyer’ once you add all those up it’s over five hundred searches a month.
Lets pop back to Google AdWords, they estimate that the cost per click is $27 a click and that’s a lot of twenty seven dollars. Remember that’s only to get somebody to click on your ad go to your website and you may need several clicks to get somebody to fill out some kind of contact form or to call you before you get one customer. You can now start to see how twenty seven dollars a click can get very very expensive pretty quick and traditionally the legal field is very competitive online and it’s very expensive because the payouts of a new client is pretty lucrative.
If you are thinking about going to invest in SEO what kind of return on investment compared to other advertising are you likely to get ?.
Lets say you’re a divorce lawyer in London. Next I would use a tool calledGoogle Keyword planner for this and I take the term ‘divorce lawyer in London’.
On average in London that gets about two hundred and ten searches a month but when you take variations of that term you get over five hundred searches a month.
Variations would be ‘divorce lawyers’ plural in ‘London’ or ‘London divorce lawyer’ once you add all those up it’s over five hundred searches a month.
Lets pop back to Google AdWords, they estimate that the cost per click is $27 a click and that’s a lot of twenty seven dollars. Remember that’s only to get somebody to click on your ad go to your website and you may need several clicks to get somebody to fill out some kind of contact form or to call you before you get one customer. You can now start to see how twenty seven dollars a click can get very very expensive pretty quick and traditionally the legal field is very competitive online and it’s very expensive because the payouts of a new client is pretty lucrative.
Say I provide local SEO for your website/page and eventually you get the rank around number 4 on page one of the Google search result. You’re not at the very top of the searches but you’re in the running and you’re getting some of that click share.
As an example, you ranked number four in Google and say you know you get 70 searches a month for these variations of ‘divorce lawyer’ and ‘London’ and all the tertiary terms that come come along with it. The thing with SEO is if you can rank a webpage for ‘divorce lawyer in London’ you’re going to get a lot of secondary terms along with it and that may be ‘divorce lawyers in London’ ‘where to find divorce lawyers in London’ ‘where can I find divorce lawyers in London’. Google understands all these variations and you understand that means the same thing so a lot of times if you can rank for one of these terms you actually rank for a whole bunch of the terms.
As an example, you ranked number four in Google and say you know you get 70 searches a month for these variations of ‘divorce lawyer’ and ‘London’ and all the tertiary terms that come come along with it. The thing with SEO is if you can rank a webpage for ‘divorce lawyer in London’ you’re going to get a lot of secondary terms along with it and that may be ‘divorce lawyers in London’ ‘where to find divorce lawyers in London’ ‘where can I find divorce lawyers in London’. Google understands all these variations and you understand that means the same thing so a lot of times if you can rank for one of these terms you actually rank for a whole bunch of the terms.
So say you’re getting seventy clicks a month on average for that web page for these rankings, seventy times $27 a click is going to cost you one thousand eight hundred and ninety dollars a month so that’s a lot of money that you’re paying if you’re doing Google AdWords and PPC.
The ROI Comparison
Now you can do a comparison, $1890 a month over twenty two thousand dollars a year if you’re doing paid advertising pay-per-click advertising at $27 a click average.
That is pretty much what you’d be paying if you’re doing advertising to replace that SEO that you did where you’re getting those organic searches.
Hopefully you are now starting to see the value when you do that cost comparison against Google AdWords and what you would be paying if you had to pay for this or advertising.
These page one rankings are worth over $22,000 a year to you depending on your SEO.
If you paid somebody three thousand dollars to create a great page on your website optimised for the ‘money’ keywords and really work on that page over the course of a couple months, sending social signals and promoting the page.
Say you even paid a little bit more, you paid five thousand which might seem crazy for one web page but you can see the payout results especially in an industry like this. You spent three thousand dollars for that page and maybe after that you spend another fifteen hundred dollars a year or whatever on some basic maintenance, doing some social shares maintenance to the page optimisation, links and things like that. On average you’re spending about three thousand dollars upfront to get to get you rankings to number four and compare that to the twenty two thousand dollars you would have paid for Google advertising for that same investment and that’s where you can see long-term the ROI is much much higher.
That is pretty much what you’d be paying if you’re doing advertising to replace that SEO that you did where you’re getting those organic searches.
Hopefully you are now starting to see the value when you do that cost comparison against Google AdWords and what you would be paying if you had to pay for this or advertising.
These page one rankings are worth over $22,000 a year to you depending on your SEO.
If you paid somebody three thousand dollars to create a great page on your website optimised for the ‘money’ keywords and really work on that page over the course of a couple months, sending social signals and promoting the page.
Say you even paid a little bit more, you paid five thousand which might seem crazy for one web page but you can see the payout results especially in an industry like this. You spent three thousand dollars for that page and maybe after that you spend another fifteen hundred dollars a year or whatever on some basic maintenance, doing some social shares maintenance to the page optimisation, links and things like that. On average you’re spending about three thousand dollars upfront to get to get you rankings to number four and compare that to the twenty two thousand dollars you would have paid for Google advertising for that same investment and that’s where you can see long-term the ROI is much much higher.
Any Risk With SEO ?
There is definitely a risk with this because investing in local SEO doesn’t mean that you’re going to get the rankings. It really depends on your website, your competitors and the quality of the SEO company that you’re working with and on what they can do and what kind of budget that you’re working with.
I mean in reality it may be a little bit more than three thousand but I’m just using this as an example to show you if you were doing paid advertising how much money it would cost you when you’re trying to figure out ROI for your SEO comparing it against what you would pay in Google AdWords.
I mean in reality it may be a little bit more than three thousand but I’m just using this as an example to show you if you were doing paid advertising how much money it would cost you when you’re trying to figure out ROI for your SEO comparing it against what you would pay in Google AdWords.
If I was going to pay for just for advertising it would cost me X and if we’re going to invest in SEO it’s going to cost me X you can start to figure out what your ROI should be and of what the value of that SEO would be.
Hopefully this post helps to make sense of quite a confusing topic. I hope my example puts it all in a little more perspective on what the ROI potential is for SEO.
As a quick recap when you’re doing paid advertising as soon as you stop advertising everything resets back to zero so you lose all your value there’s no residual value to advertising.
With SEO you create that value on your website you create those rankings and even if you stop doing all SEO it doesn’t mean your web page falls off the map and you lose your rankings you may stay there for a good year or so even if you did absolutely nothing and continue to get those rankings and every month get those clicks month after month after month this is where you start to realise that ROI for your initial investment up front for SEO really was not that bad!
As a quick recap when you’re doing paid advertising as soon as you stop advertising everything resets back to zero so you lose all your value there’s no residual value to advertising.
With SEO you create that value on your website you create those rankings and even if you stop doing all SEO it doesn’t mean your web page falls off the map and you lose your rankings you may stay there for a good year or so even if you did absolutely nothing and continue to get those rankings and every month get those clicks month after month after month this is where you start to realise that ROI for your initial investment up front for SEO really was not that bad!
So I hope this gives you a little more insight on why local SEO is so important for your business and if you want to learn more you can give us a call or even pop in for a meeting and we can explain how our SEO services can help your business. We specialise in local SEO and local marketing in general so sure to bring in the clicks your business needs.
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