PPC

Pay Per Click (PPC) is very different from Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Where SEO is the long game that takes months to implement and gain traction, PPC is the opposite. You can get your business in front of paying customers immediately and get leads straight away.

This sounds great but what are the downsides? PPC can be very expensive and as soon as you pull your ads, your business is gone and won’t be shown again until you start paying again.

Take for example the term “plumber Manchester”, it averages 2400 searches a month on Google but the competition is high and a top of page bid is £10.26 which you will only pay if the user actually clicks on your link. A top of page bid for “emergency plumber Manchester” will set you back £16.10 a month!

If you bid on these terms, then you will get a fair amount of traffic to your site but you will have to be prepared to have a budget in the thousands of pounds to cover it. It’s also hard to predict how many of these clicks will result in a lead and then ultimately a sale.

The only way to do this is by testing each keyword one by one. We can place ads for you and then monitor who clicks through and which of these clicks result in sales. If you get 10 clicks at £10.26 and one sale of £450, then your Return On Investment (ROI) would be £450 – £102.60, which is £347.40 – obviously you would then have to remove your own costs and decide whether this was even worth it.

Despite all this sounding daunting, there is a reason why these keywords are so expensive. The competition is high and a lot of people are bidding on them to get their business in front of paying customers who are actually ready to buy.

Aside from Google, which holds around 90% of the global search market, there are alternative options such as Bing and now AI platforms like Perplexity where you can promote your business. These can work out cheaper but you will obviously get nowhere near the same volume in traffic.

Other options

There are other options apart from Search where you can get your business in front of paying customers but they tend to not be as lasered focused. Whereas people who are searching for an “emergency plumber” probably need one right now, someone browsing on Facebook, probably has no need for one at all.

This doesn’t mean that advertising on other platforms is a waste of money and time. You can typically buy clicks on Facebook and NextDoor for a lot less than on Google and some of that traffic will convert. The only way to find out whether it will convert or not is to test it.

We can run those ads on your behalf and push people to your website. We can then track those social media users actually contact you over a 30 day period and see whether the ads are worth buying.

Finally, there are other websites online that sell leads such as Bark and Airtasker. We can help you get set up with these sites and bidding on the requests that get posted there. As you can see though, Airtasker is not as popular as other sources.