So, again, just to kind of recap here, you’ve got three separate sections, the pay-per-click listings, where you’re able to pay your way in, the map listings, where you’ve got to have name, address, and phone number information, and then you’ve the organic section, which is driven by the content of your website and the number of inbound links and the authority of your actual domain.
The question that usually follows is, OK, so there are three different sections on the search engines. There’s a couple of different ways I can make sure I’m showing up in my area for what I do. What’s the best strategy? Should I spend my money and my energy on the pay-per-click listings? Should I ignore that because it’s too expensive and just focus on organic listings? My answer really is you want to have a strategy to be sure you’re showing up as often as possible when someone types in your city plus your service.
You probably want to have a strategy to get in the pay-per-click listings and manage that effectively. There are a lot of things you can do to manage. With a good strategy, you can actually pay less than your competition and still rank high. You want to have a strategy to make sure you’re showing up on the map and organic section so that you have placeholders all over the search engine for each of the different things that you do.
Now with that said, If you’ve got limited budget, in other words, you don’t have $10,000 a month to spend in advertising online, and you want to get the best return on investment for your time and energy, I’m going to pull up a chart, here, that you can look at. What this shows is where people typically tend to click on the search engines when they run a search.
This was a study done by comScore. What they found was, more than 70 percent of the population, when they run a search and type in your city and AC repair, more than 70 percent of the population is going to look straight at the map and organic listings, so, the non-paid listings. Remember, the paid listings are what are on the top and along the sides. The organic, non-paid are what’s in the center box. The reason for that is a lot of the population has been alerted to the fact that that’s advertising.
The notion is, when you buy a magazine, are you flipping through the magazine and looking for the ads or are you looking for the content, for the information? The reality is, in most cases, you’ll look at the ads and you’ll notice them, but you’re really looking for the content. You’re looking for the articles. You’re looking for the pictures. Similar to that, on the search engines, when you run a search, you know the ads are there and in some cases, you’re going to click them. For the most part, you’re looking for the content, which is in the organic section.
This other image on the right with the moving lights and it looks like there’s a lot going on. What that is, is a heat map. They use eye-tracking software to see, statistically, where the eye looks and what it spends most of its time looking at. This heat map also indicates that the majority of the people skim right past the paid listings and spend most of the time looking at the map and the organic section.
Again, if you’ve got a limited budget and you want to get the best return on your investment, you would probably be best served to focus on the map listings, the organic section, building more authority for your website, building more authority for your organization, so you can rank in that area where most people wind up clicking.
