SEO vs Google Ads. What’s the best option for regional Australian small business?
The SEO guy says that SEO is everything. The Google Ads guy says that you shouldn’t bother with SEO and just go straight to ads. So who’s right? Well… to be honest… they kinda both are!
A while ago I wrote a blog titled, The Small Business SEO Scam. It was all about how companies and backyard self-styled SEO experts were screwing over businesses all over the country by selling them the SEO dream… you know… that one that says, “I don’t care that I am 10 years behind everyone else and made a cheap website with some DIY page builder, this really convincing person in a call centre says that they’ll make me number 1 on Google.”
I stand by my opinion that most SEO work is a scam. When someone says that they will get you from zero to hero by putting your website on the first page of Google or even at the very top of the rankings, they are either going to take your money and run, or they are going to use a technique to trick Google’s algorithm that will last may be a week or two before you’re caught out and you’re pushed down lower than you ever were before.
So that must mean that Google Ads are the way to go, right? Well, not necessarily. For a lot of small businesses, attempting to advertise on Google is a complete waste of time! For example, in a regional town where a large infrastructure or resources project has recently ended, like Darwin, Gladstone, Port Hedland or Karratha, then trying to advertise yourself as an electrician, plumber or any trade that was in short supply during that economic bump is either going to cost you a fortune every time someone clicks on your ad, or you will be so far behind the biggest payers, that your ad won’t even show.
So where do these two things work?
An established business with a website that doesn’t rank.
Let’s look at an example of a company called Bynoe Drilling, a small business in the rural outskirts of Darwin in the Northern Territory. Despite being around for over 30 years, Gary from Bynoe Drilling had no idea about online stuff. But he had a website built for him at a reasonable price thinking that the work would come. The problem is that most web designers are not search engine optimisers. In fact, very few are — even those that say they are. What they generally do, is, install a Wordpress website with a drag and drop page builder that they have used on dozens of other websites before you, go and install a plugin called Yoast, write in some pretty words about the page it’s installed on, and call it a day.
This is pretty much what had happened with Gary’s site. It looked good. It ran ok. But none of the pre-work was ever done to connect the site to Google via Analytics and Search Console. No technical checking was done to see if the site was actually built in a way that Google could read properly. So when the European travellers who build the site were contacted to ask to help with his Google ranking, their answer was along the lines of “Oh — no we don’t do SEO. You’ll need to pay someone else to do that.”
The trouble with SEO is that there are at least 47 major factors to consider when doing it. Everything from the structure of headings on the page, to whether a separate delivery network is used for images and even whether all that code has been rearranged to deliver it as fast as possible. And then, beneath that layer, there are at least 250 factors that Google takes into account each time you type in a search query to it.
All this is way too much for Gary to deal with. He just wants more customers to get him to drill for bore water on their properties. He’s not a marketer or a web developer.
So when we were approached to help him out with SEO, we took a serious look at the state of his website, his competitors already online, and did a serious and honest side by side comparison on whether it was worth him spending money on optimising for search results on Google — or just going and paying for ads to get the same result quicker. In the case of Bynoe Drilling, the answer was SEO. There aren’t a lot of others doing what he does. Their websites were all pretty ordinary, so despite there being one guy who was dominating the search results, it wouldn’t take much to take the battle to him and even maybe knock him off the top of the results. But it took time. In fact, although we got some fairly instant results within a week to get him moved up from around Page 30 to Page 1, it took us a solid 3 months of tweaking and changing of things on his site, and his GoogleMyBusiness profile to get him to the point where, not only did he get to be even with the other guys, but he was getting those all-important bookings from his listing on Google for the first time ever.
The case of the new business in a crowded industry
Yet that’s not how it goes everyone. In the crowded Pest Control industry, Less Pest on the Gold Coast were coming from a different place. They were a brand new business built from scratch. Lots of competitors. No clients to begin with. They decided to go down the path of Google Ads to get a quick injection of new clients in place. The idea was that it would take them months for any SEO efforts to take hold — and even then, there are no guarantees in SEO. If you’re in a competitive space full of franchises and national chains, you’re never going to make a dent. But with ads, you have a lot of flexibility in the way you select search terms, whether they be general, like “Gold Coast Pest Control” which is more competititve and more expensive, or you go something more niche, like “safe termite treatments in Coombabah” with has less people looking, and therefore is cheaper to target.
Swinging up north to Darwin, Google Ads, if you are a plumber, electrician or air conditioning repair company is going to be a VERY expensive and competitive game to play. There’s too many providers, and you’ll find yourself paying up to $50 per click to get anyone through to your website. And that’s not taking into account whether they do anything once they get to you — like book a service!
But in the case of LessPest, we went to a very specific and very targeted set of geographical areas right down to individual postcodes. And then each ad was targeted at that very postcode and such specific pest control issues they may have there. In Mudgeeraba it was termites. In Elanora, spiders. In Pacific Pines, it was those pesky ants. And it worked really well, driving business for them for the next 6 months.
So what is best? SEO or Google Ads?
SEO is great when you’ve got time to watch the impact happen over months or even a year. It takes more work, more interaction, more tweaking and changing. It’s good when you have the time and inclination to be regarded as an expert in your field and are not scared to write, video or record what you’re doing. With SEO you need time and patience.
Google Ads, on the other hand, have the potential to work faster, but in bursts. It doesn’t take long for big competitors to notice what you’re doing and adjust their strategy to block you. Which is what happened with LessPest, eventually. With Google Ads you need deep pockets.
Dante St James is Head of Digital Solutions at Treeti Business Consulting, an Australian Small Business Advisory Services Digital Solutions program partner and Founder and Digital Strategist at Clickstarter, a digital agency in Darwin, Australia. He is also a Facebook AU/NZ Community Training Network Lead Trainer and partner in Google’s Digital Literacy program via Digital Springboard.
