Case Study: SEO Pays Off For New York Gutter Company
August 2, 2017
With all of the marketing channels available today, it’s easy for a small business owner to get confused. What works? Where is the ROI?
Today, any business owner seeking marketing advice is going to hear that if they’re not advertising on social media, they’re a nobody. Facebook, after all, is where all the cool kids hang out (or is that Snapchat now?).
However, say you’re a local contractor who specializes in gutter installations. Just how much social media buzz are you going to be able to create around the topic of home gutters? Well…maybe you could do some pretty good cats in gutter memes.
For the most part, however, this isn’t going to be a direct conversion channel.
Basically, you need people who are searching for gutter repair in your area to find your website. The most cost-effective tactic?
Good old SEO.
The Two-Fold Approach
Search marketing, meaning SEO (organic) and PPC (pay per click) ads are the direct descendants of the Yellow Pages. People used to look in the yellow book to find a business when they had an active need; now they go to Google or Bing and do a quick search.
For a business like gutter installation and repair, search is far and away the important marketing tactic. The majority of leads will search for this type of service on Google the way they would have used the Yellow Pages 30 years ago.
There is a two-fold approach to search marketing.
Initially, you need to do pay per click advertising. The Marketing 360® service is called Top Placement Ads® (TPA).
There are several advantages to TPA. The first is that because you use Google and Bing’s auction systems, you bid to get search ranking. This allows you to generate traffic immediately.
The second is that you literally get top placement on paid ads. These are the “sponsored” links that appear in the top four spots on the search results page.
The second approach is organic SEO. The Marketing 360® service is called Natural Listing Ads® (NLA).
NLA takes longer to gain ranking because your website has to earn authority as it pertains to how the search engines rank websites. Getting to page one can take months.
The big payoff with NLA is that once you start to gain ranking and win traffic, the cost per conversion tends to be much lower because you’re not paying for clicks.
NLA®: Out of Gutter, On To Page One
A gutter installation company in New York came to Marketing 360® needing leads. Their only request: Get the phone ringing.
Of course, this request always implicitly includes a request to get the max ROI possible.
So we hit the road running with our TPA/NLA strategy. It started exactly as expected.
They started getting leads from TPA right away. Our bidding strategy had them right on page one.
From NLA? Nada. They weren’t ranking for anything.
But we optimized their website for their target keywords and started blogging on home improvement and gutter related topics. With TPA traffic, more leads entered their sales funnel, allowing for retargeting and increasing brand awareness.
As work progressed, the number of keywords they ranked for began to jump:
Soon, we began to see the trend of NLA traffic driving the cost per conversion down:
Now, with NLA established over the last several months, the cost per conversion is by far the best with NLA:
You might think that given these numbers, they’d just turn their TPA off.
But despite the higher cost per conversion, TPA still drives ROI. It targets important keywords in geographic areas outside their main service area where they have a harder time ranking organically. It’s also used in specific promotions that convert at a very high rate.
But this case study is another example of how the tried and true tactic of SEO continues to work well for local service businesses.
You can get some valuable brand exposure from social media marketing. You have to integrate paid search advertising into your campaigns.
But when it comes to ROI, organic search traffic remains the best at delivering consistent, long-term returns.
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*Results are based on past client performance. Individual account performance may vary. Results are not guaranteed.