On this video Josh Nelson of Plumber SEO demystifies the Search Engines and helps you understand the differences between the Paid Listings (PPC), Organic Listings and Map Listings. By having an understanding of each component and how they work you can start to put a strategy in place to show up as OFTEN as possible when your customers look for your services online.
Video Transcript
Let's demystify what's happening on the search engines when someone types in, "Your city + plumber," "Your city + AC repair." You can see on the screen here, there are three distinct sections of the search engine. There are the pay?per?click listings, the map listings, and the organic listings. What I've got highlighted up along the top and along the sides is what we call the "paid area," the pay?per?click listings.
Really getting listed in that section on the search engines is a function of setting up an AdWords campaign with Google, and you can pick your keywords that you want to rank for, and bid on a per?click?basis in order to show up in that section, and that's the paid area of the search engine. It's also known as pay?per?click. Directly below that, that shows up with A, B, C, D, E, and F, is the map listings, and that's driven by Google Places, and it's also controlled by...
David, I see your question. I'm going to get to it just as soon as I get through this portion.
You can't buy your way into the map listings, or that map section. There's no way that you can tell Google, "Hey, I'll pay $1,000, $500 a month if you put me in the spot A position." Google doesn't work that way. It's driven by the authority of your company and a number of other factors.
I'm going to in?depth into the specifics of how to get ranked on the map, but I just want you to understand that's another section of the search engine. You can't buy your way into the map listings.
Then there's the organic listing, which shows up below the map, again, not driven by any cost factor. You can't buy your way into that. That's really a function of your website, the optimization of your website, title tags. We're going to be talking about that in the organic section portion of the presentation, but I just want to be clear, there are three different sections on the search engines, and you need to have a separate strategy for each one.
Before I go to the next area, I'm going to take a look at David. David Burry, thanks for your question. I appreciate it. "How many of the calls are service calls versus information calls?"
With call tracking, you do have the ability to line. I couldn't give you an exact number on that. I wish I could tell you, "90 percent was service calls and 10 percent was information calls." I will tell you this client books a lot of revenue?producing business from that.
You're always going to have noise. Some percentage of it is people just fishing for information. I hope that answers your question. Feel free to ask a follow?up on that, and guys, let me know if you've got other questions.
We talked about the differences between the organic, the paid, and the map listings. The next question we typically get is, "Well, if I can pay my way into the paid listings, why don't I just do pay?per?click?" Or the other question is, "Where should I invest my time and my energy? How can I invest my energy and get the best return on my investment?"
I've pulled up a chart here on the screen, and you can see on the left we've got, "Where do people click when they're looking for information? Where are they going? What are they looking at?" This is another study that was produced by comScore that indicates a large percent of the population, more than 70 percent, their eyes skip right past the paid listing, and they go straight to the organic listings.
You can probably say that's because the average consumer realizes that the paid listing is indeed advertising. It's kind of like if you buy a magazine, are you looking at that magazine and saying, "I'm going to look at the ads," or are you looking for the content? For the most part, you're looking for the content, which would also be considered the organic, non?paid listings.
The other image on the right is what's called a "heat map." Special technology is used to see where the eyeball is looking when they pull up a screen. This heat map just shows that the majority of people are looking directly at the map and the organic section. That's where they spend most of their time looking.
I really feel like you want to have a strategy to show up as often as possible when people are looking for what you do, so you want to show up in the paid area, you want to show up on the map, and you want to show up in the organic section, so you're showing up as often as possible, especially when someone types in, "Your city + drain cleaning," "Your city + plumber."
But if you've got limited resources, and you want to get the best return on investment, you're probably going to be best served to focus your time and your energy on the area where people look most, which, based on these two reports, is, for the most part, the organic and the map listings.
