Earned vs. Owned: Which Is Better for Home Services Companies?

You're listening to a Rocket Media blogcast. Prepare for launch as we share another great episode. Earned versus Owned which is better for Home Service Companies? Ideally, you should use both SEO and PPC in tandem for your home services marketing. Both do a great job of driving traffic to your website. But realistically, using both PPC and SEO might not make sense for your home services company since each serve two different purposes and generate leads differently. So how do you know which you should do? Refer to your digital marketing plan. Your digital marketing plan guides which tactics you use so your efforts will work together and drive your business in the right direction. But if you don't have a fleshed out digital marketing plan, use the following rules of when to use PPC Advertising for Home Service companies ppc, also known as pay per click, uses search engine advertising to drive traffic to your website or landing page. Use PPC if you want immediate results. With PPC you can get better online presence and run up and running in a month or two. Are just getting started in the digital marketing. If you don't have a full fledged website, you can drive PPC traffic to landing pages to generate leads. Are running a seasonal or time sensitive offer like tune ups or drain clearings. You can start and stop campaigns right away so you'll only advertise offers when they're available. Want to target your audience by keyword, location or time of day? PPC geo targeting lets you get specific with where you want your targets to or target your ads so you can target a specific service area for more relevant traffic. With PPC you only pay for the traffic that actually comes to your website or landing pages, so you'll only pay for the results. Just make sure your website is in order or or your leads will leave without contacting you. You also pay for prime real estate on the search engine results page, the SERPs appearing just below the local service ads. Another way home service companies can get to the top of the SERPs. Is PPC ever not a good choice? PPC is great for an immediate boost in lead volume and works well long term as long as your campaigns are managed effectively and and align with your marketing strategy to get the most from your efforts, use PPC and SEO together. As our graphic below shows, a mature website relies mostly on SEO but also uses ppc. Looking at the chart, we've got three stages early stage consisting of slight SEO and website mid stage consisting of heavy ppc, SEO and website and a mature stage consisting of medium ppc, heavy SEO and heavy website. We recommend marketing your home service company with PPC until you can ramp up your SEO efforts. When do you use SEO for home service companies? SEO is a set of techniques used to rank your website higher on search engine results page. Google takes into account ranking factors that signal how relevant your site is to the user's search query. Use SEO if the following apply Already have a website, but it needs an upgrade. To really reap the benefits of SEO, you need a full fledged website, not just a landing pages to drive traffic. You need the space to create quality content for the keywords you're targeting. Need more consistent traffic to your website Where PPC is paid traffic, SEO is organic or natural. This means your traffic doesn't depend on money spent, so it's more consistent than it would be with PPC alone. Can't wait three months or more for see results? You need a lot of time to ramp up your SEO, run diagnostics on your website, establish your goals, create content, etc. It often takes three to six months before you start to notice improved rankings for your site. When it comes to SEO for home security companies, local SEO is what really matters. As a service based business, you want to show up in the SERPs of your users in your service area, not outside of it. An optimized Google My business listing is key to showing up in local search results. These local results appear between the PPC ads and the organic search results. What's the difference between local results and the organic results? The user's intent. When a user searches using phrases like in Phoenix, Google makes sure to deliver them local businesses, hopefully yours Looking to get started with SEO or PPC? Rocket Media, we've helped home service companies make their service for more than 14 years. If you need help getting started with SEO and PPC advertising, give us a call at 800-339-7305 or drop us a line.