Many local business owners wonder why they need to bother with getting their website to the top of the search engines, and why not just buy pay per click ads instead? While pay per click advertising does have its place in an online marketing campaign, the volume of users that actually click on those ads is only around 6%! So if there is only an opportunity to get 6% of clicks, and you are competing with 5-10 other advertisers for a particular keyword, how many visitors can you expect to click on your ad and come to your site?
Pay per click does have the benefit of being able to get some traffic from many different keywords in a short period of time, where climbing in the organic listings will take longer. It is good to test out paid advertising to know which keywords are the best targets for you to go after with your SEO campaign to gain organic positioning. However the downside to pay per click is once you stop paying for the ads, the traffic stops. With organic listings, when you reach the position you are comfortable with, you can stop paying and expect to stay there for awhile in non-competitive niches. For higher competition niches, it is recommended to switch to a monthly or quarterly maintenance plan to ensure you keep your rankings.
For organic listings, which get the other 94% of search traffic, a business can utilize proper SEO to gain positioning and capture more market share for those particular keywords. While it is important to even be on page one to be relevant for a particular keyword and have a chance at getting the person searching to your site, the higher your positioning directly influences the number of visitors you can get. With non-branded keywords ‘dentist your city’, ‘plumber your city’ the top organic result gets 48% of the available organic traffic on average. The second result gets 12% and the third gets 8%. It is easy to see why you want to be at the top for the keywords you want to target. For branded keywords such as ‘Amazing Dentistry’ or ‘Joe’s Plumbing’ the top result gets 80% of the traffic!
Not to worry if you don’t have the know how or budget to push your site all the way to the top, because searches 4-10 still garner 39% of the traffic for any given keyword- much better than even the top spot on the paid results. If you want to increase your site’s rankings and get more customers already looking for your products and services online, get started with us today by clicking the button to the right.
