SEO, Facebook or Adwords?

by | Mar 9, 2018

This is a topic that comes up constantly. What is the best way for me to get clients? I’m asked.

Well ALL of them can get you clients (There are other ways) and all of them cost you money (Yes SEO isn’t FREE) sad to say 🙂 So let’s take a look.

SEO:
When a potential client sits down in front of his laptop and types into Google this little phrase..

“full house re wire”

He is looking for an electrician to do a full house re wire. It is likely he will choose a result from page 1 or 2 that catches his eye, statistics tell us this. So let’s say he clicks on your link and now he is on your website, bingo. Now if you have done your job properly with design and copy he might just contact you. A conversation is started between you and him. He becomes a prospective customer of yours. Result.

This whole transaction was in the hands of your customer. He has found you and he has come to you. Because of this he is more likely to be receptive to what you have to say.

Now of course it has cost you money to get your website to the top of Google for this search phrase. You have re written your page content, checked your internal linking, dropped regular content to your blog and have begged borrowed and stolen some links. Yes there was effort involved here but after the initial push the effort tails off considerably to maintenance mode and the odd link or Blogger Outreach.

Facebook:
Now let’s look at Facebook adverts. So the same customer is browsing Facebook, looking at his news feed of what his friends are up to. Up pops your sponsored advert with a nice image of you doing a house rewire and some enticing copy. Maybe you have crafted an offer of 10% off house re wires.

Learn More…

Our favorite button 🙂

Now of course most of the people that have this advert pop into their news feed will not be interested in a house re wire. The ones that are might be pissed off that you have had the audacity to push an advert at them in the first place. Yes there are a lot of Facebook users that don’t like Adverts in their feeds. It’s an uphill battle to overcome all of this and all the while your little advert is costing you money, the bill keeps on racking up doesn’t it. Mark loves it and I don’t mean me!

This is what I call PUSH marketing. You’re ramming your offer down the throats of people that may or may not be interested, in a space that they view as personal, their news feed! Yes it works if you get all the elements right and you tweak your advert into a fine honed beast BUT it keeps on costing you money while you run through that process! Even the person that contacts you has in the back of his mind that you came to him.

Google Adwords:
Let’s face it both Google and Facebook don’t like FREE. We do they don’t! They make their money from Adverts in the main. You can see this clearly in Google by how many of the FREE SERPS are now taken up by Adwords adverts and Local Business Maps listings. You can see it in Facebook by how many sponsored listings pop up into your daily news feed. The more you click on an advert the more adverts will be fed to you.

However Google MUST provide FREE SERPS (Search engine results pages) otherwise their whole engine falls down as no one is going to use a search service that is just adverts and nothing else. They have overcome this tricky situation by interspersing FREE results with paid adverts down the page although the FREE SERPS are getting crowded now!

I DO like, no LOVE Adwords and you can make a TON of money with it if you know what you’re doing for sure. Its is beautifully scalable. Of course we also offer this as one of our primary services to businesses. I wrote my first Adwords course way back in 2004! 14 years ago now. Where does the time go? I was a student of Perry’s back then although true to my personal story I didn’t market it properly.

Adwords-Masterclass

Adwords is slightly different to Facebook though in that now your advert looks pretty much like a normal FREE SERPS result when on the page.They don’t stand out so much on the page as being an advert.

Adwords Adverts

Back in the day our adverts were stuck out on the side in little boxes. But because your adverts now look like a FREE search result pretty much your prospective customer does not feel he has been “Sold” when he contacts you.

So to sum up. All of these can and will make you money if you put in the work that is. In order of preference for me it looks like this:

Adwords:
Lot’s to learn here interface wise if you don’t want to waste tons of money! My Adwords course is over 450 pages long! Once that learning curve is over though it is relatively easy to create adverts and spend your money with Google. Results are pretty much instant unlike SEO which can take months. You have the Ability to split test adverts and fine tune copy at the touch of a button. I love it and always have.

Facebook:
Again lot’s to learn here and it is very easy to throw money at this platform. It’s exciting but results can be hard to come by especially while you’re paying Facebook to learn! Oh you can get the interactions easy enough but do they convert and all the time you’re paying. Also of note is that with the recent announcements from Mark it is likely to become harder for advertisers and your audience is already quite hostile to sponsored adverts in their news feeds. Just check the comments on a selection of adverts in your own feed and you will see what I mean.

SEO:
Very high initial work input with lot’s to do and lost of technical expertise is needed here. This only increases if you’re in a competitive market. Slow to implement with results taking up to 6 months to appear depending on the market you are in and Googles ever changing algorithm of course. There are of course cost implications for linking, blogger outreach, page copy, keyword density and of course your own decent blog content. Effort tails off considerably once the bulk of the work is done. High satisfaction level of being on page one in Google for sure but it takes TIME!

Mark..

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