Although I don’t like to mention the ‘R’ word it is a fact that local businesses are being hit by the current financial situation. If you are in a business that primarily services the local community, you will know that getting new business can be hard.
The good news is that there are a lot of things you can probably do to market your services online – but is it worth it?
According to a recent report (Alexa.com) 80% of people search online first when looking for services.
In a normal search the No 1 position gets 41% of all clicks, the 2nd position gets 12% of clicks and the third place gets only 8.5% of clicks.
This means if you are not in the first 3 places on a Google search for your particular keywords you might as well not exist.
That’s the bad news. Here comes part one of the good news:
Take a keyword search of ‘plumber Birmingham’ which has 53 searches a day on Google.
If only 10 % click on your link that’s 159 clicks a month. Assuming only 5% do something i.e. call or email that’s 8 extra leads. A rubbish conversion rate of only 25% of those means you will have an extra 2 customers per week. Not brilliant I admit but since most of the techniques I’m going to be talking about are free, I don’t think it’s worth turning them down.
And that was a really bad example. Not many searches and rubbish conversion rates. Just think what you could do with a really good search term like ‘dating advice’
Look out for the next post in this series where I share simple SEO tips and tricks that you could implement today and immediately increase you Google ranking.