Money into Adwords or SEO?

[R.O.S.S.I]

As a company would you want to plough your money into Adwords or SEO? or have a mix of both and if so, what kind of mix, more Adwords less SEO, 50:50 etc?

I ask as the place I am currently working does no PPC work at all at the moment but has a web company in managing the SEO for their website.

Now we aren't a company whereby you can track conversions per se as we don't sell any tangible product which you can buy through our website - our website is a vehicle purely for people to find out about us, the services we offer and then ultimately get in touch with us etc.

Say for arguments sake we spend £1000 per month on SEO and £0 on adwords, I know its difficult to say without examining likely costs of keywords but what proportion do you think we should employ for Adwords if we were to take it from the SEO budget? Or do you think we should spend the same amount? More?

I don't know much about this area, and I think SEO is a bit of a dark art in some respects, but even though this is a bit of a vague question in general should we be doing more Adwords stuff or more SEO?

 

[unwashed potato!]

a good question that i'd like to know the feel for too. we actually do the opposite, spend all money on ppc and that's literally how we run. if it weren't for ppc we'd struggle as a business. i've signed up to a cheap seo indian company recently for a new site so hope to see some direct results from this soon.

i think long term, seo is cheaper as generally once you're up there, it's easy to stay up on first page and you get customers without and further charge, where as with ppc as soon as you stop paying customers stop calling. you're gone as though you never existed. PPC gets results quickly, SEO over time.

based on what i see other companies do, if i type a search in and they get first page result, they also have ppc going too as i guess being there twice or even 3 times with the local listings, this is much more valuable

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

We appear to show on Google on the first page for most things related to "place name + various services we offer" which I imagine is down to the SEO on the site.

But im not sure thats because im logged into Google with my work business Google account so not sure if it shows our own business higher ranked to just us. Is there a way of running Google searches as a general member of the public, or are the results i see going to be the same as everyone else?

 

[PaulB]

We appear to show on Google on the first page for most things related to "place name + various services we offer" which I imagine is down to the SEO on the site.

But im not sure thats because im logged into Google with my work business Google account so not sure if it shows our own business higher ranked to just us. Is there a way of running Google searches as a general member of the public, or are the results i see going to be the same as everyone else?

Opening a new incognito window in Chrome (or InPrivate browsing in IE) and performing a search that way should do this I think.

 

[AHarvey]

Have you also got a Google+ account setup for the business that is verified etc

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

Have you also got a Google+ account setup for the business that is verified etc

Yep. Google Plus page set up with business address and verified.

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

Have you also got a Google+ account setup for the business that is verified etc

Ah I will check that out tomorrow see if it brings any differennt results up.

 

[Craig321]

Adwords can make a huge difference, but it can get extremely expensive to make a noticeable difference if you're in an area with competitive keywords.

In terms of ploughing a load of money in to it, it isn't always necessary and really depends on the name of your company and what you do. If you sell cars in Warwickshire and you own warwickshirecars.com and your company is called Warwickshire Cars, then as long as you're on Google Maps and listed on Google etc., the SEO is going to be pretty damn easy and you'll be pretty much at the top automatically unless your site is absolutely terrible or you do something weird with it. If you have a fancy hipster name that means absolutely nothing then you'll find SEO a lot harder and a lot more expensive.

In terms of what you should spend, it again depends on your business. Some have keywords that are relatively cheap, some have stupidly expensive words. If you can afford it, stick a few hundred £ in or even £1k as you suggested and see what happens to your traffic. If you log in to adwords you should also be able to see how much particular keywords are going to cost you to get an idea.

I'm not an expert, but the above is just my experience with it.

 

[AHarvey]

Adwords can make a huge difference, but it can get extremely expensive to make a noticeable difference if you're in an area with competitive keywords.

Definitely so, my current job is with a local estate planning company that operate nationwide. For the word "Will" they can be paying up to £12 a click in London, hence why it's cheaper for them to run a team of 2 working on SEO, social media and blogging

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

We do Twitter, LinkedIn and G+ atm in terms of social media. I'm going to push for them to open a Facebook page too which we may sink some advertising in as well.

We're pretty regular with blogs on our website too so in that respect the content is pretty fresh. I aim to get at least 2 blogs up a month about topical things so hoping this helps with SEO.

I'm going to look into adwords and see what the likely costs are for the keywords we'd be looking at. Google must be making an absolute fortune from Adwords. I've seen some keywords at higher than £12 a click so the mind boggles just how much money its making them!

 

[AHarvey]

Use google trends as well as Adword planner

 

[unwashed potato!]

We do Twitter, LinkedIn and G+ atm in terms of social media. I'm going to push for them to open a Facebook page too which we may sink some advertising in as well.

i'd like to know is this really any good for seo though? i've always felt most companies social media pages are just spam fests of posts no one really cares about just for SEO purposes, and thus google shouldn't give them any reward for it. loads of posts, zero comments.

I've seen some keywords at higher than £12 a click so the mind boggles just how much money its making them!

it's crazy right. i've done adwords for cleaning and spring and end of tenancy are fairly low cost, between pennies to at most £2 per click. Removals is at least £5 for rubbish keywords, more than £10 for good ones. it's crazy but their algorithm works out what they can charge and they do it.

 

[dmsims]

The pertinent question is what are the SEO company doing for £X per month (I hope it isn't a £1000!!)?

Can you give your site URL ?

 

[AHarvey]

i'd like to know is this really any good for seo though? i've always felt most companies social media pages are just spam fests of posts no one really cares about just for SEO purposes, and thus google shouldn't give them any reward for it. loads of posts, zero comments.

One of the thing they use to rank a site is number of visitors and time spent.

If you use social media to educate people instead of just for selling, sharing blog posts or information from the main page as well as interacting with people it can mean people come to your site and it can help bump it up.

You've also got to consider the reach of facebook ads over PPC. We have consultants plowing £50 into boosting a post and reaching 5000 - 10000 people, all of the target age and area. They get shared, people comment, people like. They then use that to message people thanking them for liking the page, it builds bonds and leads to sales.

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

The pertinent question is what are the SEO company doing for £X per month (I hope it isn't a £1000!!)?

Can you give your site URL ?

This is what their strategy from Jan-March was..... (and no we don't pay £1000 for SEO!)

Continue refreshing landing pages on the site - To improve user
engagement on the site, which will help users find the information they are
looking for quickly -and geo targeting

Local optimisation - review and refresh meta titles on category
pages. - Improve local visibility in search results for terms appearing
alongside the areas you operate

Carry out a full review of the backlink profile - Identify and remove
links in the profile which no longer provide value to the overall quality score ofthe link profile

Google Analytics Review Monitoring - Google Analytics to identify and monitor any trends, issues or opportunities

 

[dmsims]

That's just boilerplate mumbo jumbo

what are they actually doing each month?

e.g. how many backlinks did they remove ? (assumimg you even can!)

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

That's what I'm thinking - I've no idea they are doing what they say. Apparently we have ten hours of their time each month which is what they divvy up in that list (or were doing in Jan-March.

I know they do send though content change suggestions for various pages on our site but other than that I know very little of what they actually do.

Does anyone know what the going rate is per hour for decent SEO management?

 

[AHarvey]

rates vary but they're not doing anything that couldn't be done in house.

Google Analytics is super simple to use.

Backlinks isn't hard to do. Check for backlinks, see which are spam and supply a list to google to have them blocked from your analytics.

 

[radderfire]

Do more with AdWords, and set up campaign tracking so you know how effective it is.

 

[AHarvey]

Do more with AdWords, and set up campaign tracking so you know how effective it is.

And then what happens when your adwords campaign is either costing more than it's bringing in or you decide to end it?

Adwords is great when starting or you would like to add to an existing site with good SEO, but SEO is always more important.