Louis Massaro breaks down SEO versus PPC for moving companies. SEO takes time but builds long-term value; PPC delivers immediate results if your landing page and sales process actually convert leads into bookings. Most successful competitors use both.
Here's what I'll tell you. If you're considering like, should I do SEO? Should I do pay per click? Let me give you kind of an example of the two and then it'll help you to decide. SEO is an investment, right? Meaning when you spend money to a, you know, someone to handle your SEO for you, or you decide to invest in the time to do it yourself, because if you're doing it yourself, it's still an investment. You're choosing to spend your time doing that, investing your time right over doing something else that you could be doing with your time to generate more money. Either way, it's an investment that's not gonna pay off right away. You're not gonna see results instantly from SEO. You can barely pay your rent, right? And you could barely buy food. And you know, you're just kind of getting by living paycheck to paycheck. You got a little extra money, but not a lot. Are you gonna go invest? Are you going to go buy real estate? Are you going to go buy stocks? Are you going to go invest in things that are going to increase in value, right? If you could barely take care of your day to day needs, chances are you're not going to be doing that. So it's the same thing with your moving company. Unless you have the money or the time, which they're really the same thing, to invest in SEO without seeing results over the long term, then you shouldn't do it. If you're not in that position, right? Which I know a lot of companies aren't, until you're established, then you need to spend the money on pay per click because you're going to get that instant return, right? You're going to be able to put that money up, run those ads and see that return right away. Now, just because you can do a paper like you could go online right now, go Google. How do I set up a pay per click ad and believe there's the tutorials there to show you how to do it? Because Google wants your money, right? They're gonna tell you how to set it up. However, there's a lot that goes into it. I mean, it's a very, very detailed thing from, you know, it really starts with your, you know, with your ad, right? Really with the keywords and the target market that you're, you're going for. Then it's your actual ad that they see, then your landing page, right? So getting the click, you're paying for it. Once you, once you get the click, you pay for it just because they land on your page doesn't mean that's going to convert into a lead. Remember, you want all your marketing to build trust and capture leads, right? Meaning builds trust by, wow, they land on this page and they're like, this is a company that, you know, I could see myself doing business with them just based on what I see. That gives me a good feeling. And then capture leads based on your calls to action with your phone numbers and your web forms, okay? A poor designed landing page will cost you a fortune because you're getting people that are bouncing off the site, they're landing there, which you pay for, but you're not converting it into a lead. Okay, so now you convert it into a lead, but now you've got to turn that into a booked move, right? Just because you got the lead doesn't mean you're gonna book that lead. Without a strong sales process, you could generate all kinds of leads, right? Everybody will say, louis, where the best lead sources? Where the best lead sources? You can get all the leads in the world. And then you'll say, they don't work. They don't work. Is it that the leads don't work, or is it that the sales process is broken? So here's what I could tell you specifically when it comes to pay per click, is it's not going to be cost effective if you have a broken sales process. And I don't even mean to say broken. Right. But not a strong sales process. SEO versus pay per click. Okay, we're only talking about these two forms of marketing. Ideally, you'd be doing both, right? The major players in any. Any city are doing both, right? They have other things going on. They've got the direct mail, they're buying leads, they've got referral programs. They've got all kinds of other stuff going on. However, when someone is looking for a mover in this modern day of marketing, they're going and doing a search online. Okay? So you want to be there, but you need to be there in a way that's profitable.
