Paid search or organic? Do you like money?

Hello again. This is Michael Byrd with Home Services Digital. We are on video number 23. I’ve gotten it straight. It’s actually 23.

You can make the phone ring either way, paid or organic. Or both. So …

Today I’m going to talk about Google AdWords again, and another reason that you should give this full consideration as a businessperson looking to maximize your return on investment, to make the phone ring. Basically you want to make the phone ring, and the question is often Which is better: Google paid results or Google organic results? And there are plenty of articles. There are plenty of people taking about this particular question of this versus that, using percentages. How many percentage-wise, how many people click, on a given search, the paid results? How many people click the organic results? And leaving out, in the middle, the maps, which is some of both. You’ve got some paid in there now; you have some organic.

I’m gonna show you—switch over to the screen—we’re going to show you a couple of articles where people take up the topic in this way. Which is better? Here’s an article right here: SEO, that’s organic, versus AdWords, that’s paid. Which works better for your business? And this is a Huffington Post article, and going into the typical arguments. I’m not even gonna read them, which businesses should do this, which should do that. I will tell you the same things. Price: SEO takes longer. You can—when you get ranking—SEO can be cheaper. We’re gonna go into more of that later so I don’t want to get too bogged down as to that but the question for today is paid versus organic and whether or not you should even bother looking at the paid.

We talked last time about how you skip past the ads—a lot of us do, and actually I don’t, not anymore. All right here’s another one. Which works better, paid or organic. Now this is on the Moz website. That’s a very well-respected website. And you see that the organic clicks are beginning to shift toward paid. Their percentage of paid has always been—take my word for it for now—always been good. You’ll catch enough fish in that paid department but it might not be the most. Now here’s an interesting part of this right here: organic click-through rate—that’s what CTR is—loses 25% share on the desktop but 55% on mobile. Now think about it. Again, it goes back to common sense. If you’re searching for something on a mobile phone, a couple of things. No. 1, you don’t have as much screen area so you’re more likely to do the thing that comes up first. If you’re looking for plumber, if you’re looking for a heating and air contractor you may not be so picky, and you may not be looking at various parts of the screen because you don’t have that much screen.

Is it possible that doing both is better, like 1 plus 1 equals 3?

OK, so there’s another article that essentially takes up which way is the trend going, this versus that. What I really want to get you to is the way we look at it and what our experience has been. And here are a couple of other articles that take up this sort of way of doing it. This article: when you use—forget about the defensive part. The point here is that, let’s look at these top three bullets. When the search result page shows only an ad the ad gets a five percent, five-point-six percent of clicks. When the search result page showed only organic you get a little bit better: six-point-one-five. OK, but when you get both of them up there you really are compounding your results. What you’re creating here is a lot of credibility for the person who’s looking. They see an ad, they see an organic result on the same screen right there together and they go “well, this must be the company” and I’m gonna click one of these. They may not pay attention to which one they click. Doesn’t matter. They’ve seen it twice; must be important. So that is a good way to view it.

Here’s another one that takes a similar understanding. Look at the last sentence here. Well, let me just show you the diagram. Somebody did a search for wire framing software. A particular company—Balsamic or Balsamique—is up here in the paid. They’re in here in the organic, and they get a lot of clicks. For me, there’s nothing to weigh between Adwords and SEO. It’s both.

Now I’m going to give you my real world understanding. Here’s a customer of ours, an actual customer. We did a search just to show you this, collision repair. Here’s what you really want to get. OK, let me just go to the top to show you. Collision repair, the search. This is the customer, Port City Collision. I’m not going to click on this but we manage their AdWords account for them, and here they are. They’re getting clicks. That stuff is working and they are doing great. Here they are in the map section, and they’ve got all their stars on it. Look at that. That is great. OK, it’s another chance that they’re gonna get the clicks. And here they are organically. They are third. That’s not too bad. It’s actually very good.

When we look at their statistics for any given time period, we have seen a 30 to 70 percent swing, we’ve seen an almost 50/50 but here’s the thing: Let’s take the case of the 50/50, OK. Either one is good. If they were not appearing in Google AdWords that’s 50% of the clicks and 50% of the phone calls, most likely, that they would not have gotten.

Whomever it was, all of those people during that same month who clicked on the Google AdWords ad for a collision repair shop they were not searching for that one. They were just searching for a body shop. Those people—let’s say it’s it’s a hundred people and that there were two hundred clicks altogether, half of them in Adwords, half of them in organic search. Leave maps out of this equation they got 200 clicks; a hundred here, a hundred there. If that ad had not been in there they would have only gotten a hundred clicks. That’s half the number of clicks. You need to do it all, OK. The question is Which do you do first? We’ve talked about that. We’re gonna talk about that some more. AdWords works. You do not want to leave it out. I’m gonna get into the particulars about how to do this in a way that’s intelligent and that gets you a very, very good return on investment.

That’s our video for today, video number 23. I’m Michael Byrd with Home Services Digital. Please subscribe, and please share this with a friend. Thank you.