Did your telephone directory salesman offer you a great deal on internet advertising?

Some of my local business clients reported that when their ad came up for renewal in the most popular telephone directory (think yellow), that they were offered various internet marketing packages.  They were told that its great that they are getting good organic positions on the search engines, but that they need to be in the paid ad sections for their chosen keywords.  (I’ll explain what all that means in a minute)

To accomplish getting ad positions in the “sponsored ad” sections (ie. paid ads) on the google search engine, my local business clients were offered an advertising campaign for $500 per month.  For this $500 per month, the telephone directory, who claims to have partnered with Google, will ensure that your business appears in those sponsored ad spots.  Now, understand this $500 per month is in addition to the $600 – $1500 per month for their print ad in the directory.

First off… anyone can open an Google Adwords account and get placed in those spots.  You can likely do it for far less than $500 per month, especially for local search results, but that aside… Google itself has admitted that those ads are not getting clicked!

The image below shows search results for Car Insurance, just as a random example.  The listings on the top and down the right hand side are “Sponsored Links”, also known as pay per click (PPC), or Adwords.  The percentages show the conversion rates – in other words, how many potential customers who see the listing actually click on it.

Clearly, the organic listings get FAR better conversions.  And the listing in the top position takes the majority of “hits”.  The local business owner who takes those top 3 positions, will virtually get all the traffic for that keyword term. (click on the image for a larger view)

Do You Really Want to PAY for Less Traffic?

I can almost hear the salesman trying to sell you on Sponsored Listings saying, “well sure, but do you want to miss out on that 1% to 3%”  My response to that would depend on my industry, but mostly what that 1%-3% translates to in numbers.  It all depends on the number of searches being done daily.  Quite honestly, if I had an extra $500 per month to invest in my advertising online, I’d put those dollars into Facebook Advertising where the conversions are better.

Alberta Local Internet Marketing Flyer

Caution: Do not start building your own website until you read this.  Knee jerk reactions cost time and money.  There are things you should consider before purchasing a site builder!

If You Build It, They Will Come…

Remember the movie “Field of Dreams”?

When it comes to website traffic, you are truly dreaming if you think that building the website is the key to gaining web traffic.  Naturally, without a website, there is no hope (that’s not entirely true either*) of being found online, but it takes far more than a fancy website to get visitors.

There are some very good website building programs on the internet.  My personal favorite is SiteBuildIt, but there are others that are almost as good.  With SBI, you can build your own website, and although they say you don’t need any knowledge, trust me when I tell you that there will be a learning curve.  There is no magic button, but for the business owner with the time, patience and desire to learn, SBI is one of the best do it yourself solutions you’ll find.

The actual site building process is the easy part.  It’s the optimization that is the real challenge.  Again, SBI provides some SEO (search engine optimization) techniques, especially with regard to on page SEO.  On page SEO is just a fancy term for making sure you have the right code inserted in the source of your site so that the search engines can find your site.  Again, that is just a very small piece of the puzzle.

Search engines, like Google, Yahoo and Bing use what we refer to as algorithms to index websites submitted for inclusion in their index.  You can click on the word to get the wikipedia definition.  In short, the Search Engine Algorithms are the “rules” for getting a site ranked or even included at all in an index.  Those rules change frequently.  So if you are planning to do it yourself, keeping up with the changes is a must.  What is acceptable today could get you removed tomorrow.  All your hard work (and there is some hard work involved) can be gone in the wink of an eye.

Generally speaking, if you are not an “internet guy”, my recommendation is that you should go ahead and build your own site, if you like a challenge and are motivated.  But unless you are seriously motivated, have lots of extra time and aren’ t in a hurry to get your site to the top of the search engines, you should consider getting an expert to market your new site for you.

*Read my short article on why you do not need a website to get top rank.