Six Alternatives for Local Businesses

Pay per Click advertising (PPC) can work well for lots of businesses.

There was a time when many small business owners used PPC as a way of getting visibility on page one of the search engine results once their website had just launched.

If you’re still paying for PPC advertising each month for local search terms e.g. window cleaners Manchester you could be throwing money down the drain.

Read on below to discover some alternatives to PPC that may work out better  for your business.

• Google Places

With Google Places listings now being given more prominence in many local search results, your PPC adverts may not be having the same impact.

Rather than spend money on a PPC advertising budget every month, you would be better off investing the time in your Google Places advert and optimising it to gain a good ranking on the left hand side of the search engine results as these get a higher percentage of visitors than PPC adverts on the right.

• Banner advertising

Depending on costs, you may generate a better return on investment by placing a banner advert on a relevant site rather than using PPC advertising.

For example, if you’re a window cleaning company in Manchester you may find it hard to compete with the bigger companies in the search engine results.

A banner advert on a popular local site such as a home improvement blog may result in more customers for less of a financial outlay than PPC.

• Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Not all local search results are currently displayed in the same way. If you type in the term you want to rank highly for you may find there are one or two entries that still feature above the Google Places listings.

If this is consistently the case, you may want to divert your PPC budget to SEO in order to gain higher visibility. One of the drawbacks of PPC advertising is you are continually paying to get your adverts displayed.

An effective SEO campaign may cost you more initially per month but in the long term could work out much better overall in terms of return on investment.

• Using eBay to sell your products

If you’re selling products online to the whole of the UK or worldwide, it’s worth experimenting with eBay to compare the sales achieved by your PPC campaign.

The cost of listing items on eBay could work out a lot less than the cost of a single click using PPC, depending on what you’re selling.

• Local online adverts

There are many online advertising sites that have town/city specific sections, such as Gumtree.

Again, you may want to experiment with an advert on these sites which in some cases may be free or only cost you a few pounds.

Running an advert alongside a PPC campaign and monitoring the responses will show you which method of advertising is working best.

• Could your PPC budget be better spent on your website?

A common problem many small business owners have is not getting a good return on investment from PPC advertising and giving up on it.

Very often the problem isn’t the PPC advertising platform itself but the small business website the traffic is being directed to.

There are a number of reasons why people visiting your site won’t place an order or get in touch ranging from poor design, slow loading speed, complicated checkout process and lack of compelling text right through to your products/services being over or even under-priced.

If your PPC conversions are very low, it may be time to get an outside opinion on why your website isn’t converting visitors into customers and using your PPC budget to put things right.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 11th, 2011 at 8:30 am and is filed under Pay per Click. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.