For local businesses, SEO is a dirty word. They don’t want to hear it spoken, and they certainly don’t want to be pitched on your SEO services. To these people, SEO is a ripoff and it’s actually impossible to get their website ranking on the first page of Google. They should know, of course, because they’ve paid thousands of dollars to different “SEO snake oil salesmen” who have taken their money and delivered absolutely nothing in return.
This is a complaint about SEO that I hear every single day when I’m talking to new prospects. It’s very rare that I get on a call with a business owner who has come through our marketing channels and have them NOT tell me about a horrible experience they had with an SEO company.
It’s understandable, of course. There are a lot of shady operators in the world of SEO, but there’s a good reason for that: SEO is extremely lucrative, and every business selling ANYTHING can benefit from it.
Seriously, the market for SEO is pretty much limitless.
Even though business owners would like to pretend otherwise, they actually do need SEO and usually somewhere deep down they know that fact.
You’ve got to put yourself in the shoes of one of these local business owners. Let’s take your typical home contractor. This guy knows how to put up houses, fix a leaky sink, remodel your kitchen, seal your driveway, paint your house, he knows it all. He also knows how to get it done quickly, and effectively. In the world of home contractors, he’s a heavyweight.
However, when our example home contractor decided to open his own contracting company, he thought it would be easy to get new clients. Just print up a few flyers, post them on community bulletin boards around town, hand out business cards at church, and maybe sponsor his son’s little league team.
Then with all these pieces of marketing in place, his company will have more business than they can handle in no time.
Simple right?
Well, if this was 1993, sure. He would be getting plenty of phone calls from this kind of traditional marketing. Heck, he might even be tempted to take out an ad in the Yellow Pages, that would get him a heck of an ROI, right?
But sadly, we’re no longer living in the age of print marketing, we’re firmly and definitely in the digital age. Putting up flyers advertising your contracting service, won’t get you far. In fact, it’s more likely to hurt your business than help it.
“Hmm, this guy is advertising with a flyer? He must not be trustworthy if the best he can do it a paper flyer…” someone seeing the bulletin board might think.
In 2016, the best way for our home contractor to fill his calendar with new, high-paying jobs, is online. He needs to become a digital marketing expert, or at least semi-proficient to generate the leads he needs to keep the business open. It’s simply not enough to buy a domain name from GoDaddy and use their crappy website builder to make a homepage for your business.
Remember the old saying from Field of Dreams “If you build it, they will come.”? While this might be true for a baseball field smack-dab in the middle of corn country, America, it is not true for local business websites.
Just because a business owner takes a few hours to build themselves a simple website with Wix or whatever, doesn’t mean anyone will be able to find it. At that point after building a simple website for themselves, your average local business owner (our home contractor again) might be tempted to try Google Adwords, and why not?
Google positions their Adwords service as the perfect solution for your local business owner to get more business. In a way, they’re right to say that, especially not that they have their Adwords express solution that streamlines the whole process. But this simplicity is deceptive. Even though Adwords might seem like the ideal solution to all of your local business’ lead generation problems, when you break down the numbers for your average local business owner, it just doesn’t make economic sense for them.
Plus, not to mention, that likely our example home contractor doesn’t know much about conversion rate optimization. Instead of driving traffic through his Adwords campaign to an optimized landing page, he’s probably just driving it right to the home page of his crappy website. After a couple weeks of money spent with little to no phone calls, he’s going to start calling Adwords a scam, and he’s right in a sense.
So what makes sense for local business owners to invest in for their marketing? Yep, you guessed it: SEO
With SEO, this hypothetical business owner owns his traffic source instead of being dependant on paying Google for all of his leads. It can be a tricky value proposition to get across to some people, but it’s worth it for the health of their business.
If you’re interested in learning more about your business can benefit frohigh-qualityty SEO, come pay us a visit at: http://michaeljcahill.com/