Local SEO is not a cost but a Return Of Investment

why local SEO is so important for your small business. Now ready I assume that you already know what Search Engine Optimization is? It’s the practice of trying to get your web website or web pages rank high in the search engine results when people search for your type of business or service, and we’re going to talk about why it’s important and make a comparison against advertising, so when it comes to doing local there are a couple of things to compare it against.

Why Local Business Optimization Is better than Advertising

what we’re talking about advertising here we talk about PPC which is pay-per-click advertising namely Google Adwords. Because a lot of small businesses do Google AdWords but not a lot of companies invest in Local google search term, and the reason being is advertising is easy to get started.

Advertising is Easy But Not Sustainable

 it’s easy to see results whereas Optimization is a little bit more challenging to get started and when you actually implement it you don’t look at 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 what we’re going to talk about here today okay so when it comes to local Search Engine Optimization  verse pay-per-click advertising paid online advertising there’s a couple of advantage to it number one is people tend to trust the organic search results over ads that show up in the search results.

So organic search results tend to get more clicks

people tend to believe those rankings more than the typical advertisements that are above and at the bottom of the search results page. Number two it works for you month after month when you do pay advertising or any advertising as soon as you stop you know to stay the advert or you end paying for it everything goes back to zero there’s no lasting value there’s no residual value to it yeah the paying for it and getting results as soon as you stop paying the results stay when it comes to Optimization you make that investment upfront and 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 maintenance with your website and with your Technical Optimizing part.

You can see results year after year for you know work

you did months ago or even years ago so it works for you month after month and most importantly it provides a better long term ROI over paid advertising now one of the hardest things when it comes to SEO it’s figuring out what’s the ROI for you know if I’m gonna invest all this money upfront cause SEO definitely costs quite a bit of money because it’s time-consuming and it can be difficult depending on what industry you’re in to get those rankings so sometimes it’s hard to figure out the ROI so I’m going to give me an example of how you can figure out well if I’m going to invest in Website Optimization what kind of return on investment compared to other you know namely advertising what type of return on investment can I get okay so I’m going to give an example here say

you’re a divorce attorney in Charlotte North Carolina,

now I use Google Keyword planner for this, so these are real numbers that we’re working with here say we take the term divorce attorney in Charlotte okay on average in Charlotte that gets about two hundred and ten searches a month for this term divorce attorney in Charlotte. When you take variations of that term you get over five hundred searches a month so changes would be divorce attorneys plural in Charlotte or Charlotte divorce attorneys all those kind of varieties.

once you once you add all those up it’s over five hundred searches a month okay so Google AdWords estimates that the cost per click is twenty-seven dollars a click that’s a lot twenty-seven dollars is about, and that’s per click okay so 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 contact form or the call you and above that you may need to get several leads you know people fill in that forms are calling you before you get one customer so you can see how twenty dollars a click can get very very expensive pretty quick and traditionally attorneys the legal field is very competitive online, and because the payouts take the land a new client is pretty lucrative so for this is $20 ok so let’s take an example to say you do Optimization you invest in SEO

You get the rank around number four on page one of the Google search result

So you’re not at the very top getting the lion’s share of the searches but you’re in the running and you’re getting some of that click share. So let’s take this example you rank them perform Google and say you know this is just an estimate say you get 70 searches a month.  70 clicks a month for these variations of a divorce attorney in Charlotte and all the tertiary terms that come along with it. This Proper Optimization can rank if you can classify a webpage for a divorce attorney in Charlotte you’re going to get a lot of secondary terms along with it and that may be divorce attorneys in Charlotte where to find divorce attorneys in Charlotte where can I find divorce lawyers in Charlotte.

Google understands all these variations and the realize that means the same thing so a lot of times if you can rank for one of these terms you actually list for a whole bunch of the search terms okay so say you’re getting 70 clicks a month on average for that webpage for these rankings okay 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 were doing Google AdWords so that’s kind of how you can do a comparison okay so one thousand eight hundred ninety dollars a month over twenty two thousand dollars a year if you’re doing paid advertising pay-per-click advertising twenty seven dollars a click average that’s 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 so you can see the value when you do that cost comparison the value comparison against Google AdWords what you would be paying if you had to pay for this or advertising you can see that page and these rankings are worth over twenty two thousand dollars a year to you

Benefit Of Proper Search Engine Optimization

just an say you paid somebody three thousand dollars to create a great page on your website optimize the copy get links for social shares and really work on that page over the course of a couple months and say you even paid a little bit more so you paid five thousand okay which might seem crazy for one webpage but you can see the payout results chiefly in an industry like this where it’s really competitive okay but say you spent three thousand dollars for that and maybe after that you spend another fifteen hundred dollars a year or whatever on some basic maintenance on doing some social shares maintenance to the page optimization links things like that so on average you’re spending you spend about three thousand dollars up front to get to get you rankings to number four okay 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 you know there is definitely a risk with this because investing in Website Optimization doesn’t mean that you’re gonna get the rankings it really depends on your website your competitors and the quality of the SEO company that you’re working with on what they can do and what kind of budget that you’re working with because 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 so when you’re trying to figure out ROI for your SEO comparing

what you would spend in Google AdWords is a great comparison

it’s a great way to figure out okay well if I was going to pay for this 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 any kind of what the value of that Local Website Optimization.

Hopefully makes sense and hopefully, this example makes puts in a little bit more perspective on what the ROI potential is for SEO and to recap when you’re doing. when you do paint advertising as soon as you stop advertising everything resets back to zero, so you lose all your value if there’s no residual value to advertising you know you know the paying or your not your ads or other on or they’re not with Search Engine Optimization you create that value on your website you create those rankings and even if you stop doing all Optimization Work it doesn’t mean your webpage 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 and start and keep realizing that ROI for your initial investment up front so hopefully this gives you a little more insight on why local Search EngineOptimization is so important for your small business, and if you want to learn more you can go to BrandRaz we specialize in local SEO and local marketing in general  at San Antonio