Local Marketing vs SEO vs PPC.

Which marketing strategy is the best?

At Gainesville Marketing, we hear this question a lot from clients who are worried about getting the most for their money and driving their company on a path straight toward profits. But online marketing isn’t exactly the same as traditional marketing. A more comprehensive approach might serve your business better, depending on your company’s goals.

Determine Your Goals

In order to choose the Internet marketing strategies that will give you desired results, we need to determine the goals of your company. Increased website traffic, additional click-throughs, better rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs), higher conversion rates, or a boost in brand awareness/loyalty/reputation can all be addressed using our marketing techniques. Once you define your goals (and you can have more than one goal), then we can build a strategy to reach those goals.

Learn About Local, SEO and PPC Marketing

Our Gainesville Marketing marketing team believes in the power of education and being informed. That’s why we encourage our clients to learn about each marketing technique so that they can better understand what to expect in terms of planning, implementation, testing and results.

Search Engine Optimization

We’ll start with search engine optimization or SEO. There are several components that are considered SEO techniques, and each of them can help increase your organic SERP rankings and appeal to consumers.

The main component involved in SEO is providing content that is well-written, informative, thought-provoking and serves a purpose. Such content is ranked highly among search engines, which makes it easier for your consumers to find your site.

High-quality content will not go unnoticed with your audience, consumers, followers and colleagues in the industry. Better content will help form a bond with your consumers as they rely on your website, blog and social media profile for information. That bond is built on trust, and that leads to brand loyalty and better brand reputations. It can also lead to increased sales.

Creating unique content is easy for your Gainesville Marketing SEO writers. We can provide you with website copy, blogging material, online press releases, social media marketing and more. And once you have content that is worth “liking” and sharing, more people will link back to your site, which is called backlinking. Backlinking is another technique that is preferred by search engines, which again, can boost your rankings.

Local SEO

Local search engine optimization is how your local consumers will be able to find you. It’s so frustrating for consumers who perform a search, knowing a certain business is in the area, and have it not appear on local result listings.

Gainesville Marketing can help your company be listed on search engine results for local listings, as well as a number of other online directories. Through Moz Integration and Yext, we can ensure your business is included in powerful networks that present your company’s profile across the web. And with advanced technology, you can make a change to one profile and have it update more than 50 instances of your profile throughout the network.

Why is local SEO important? It’s how millions of people are finding stores, restaurants, and business locations that are close to them. More searchers use geo-targeting location keywords in their searches, which is Google-speak for saying they search with a specific city or state along with their keywords. So, if they’re searching for our website, they might search “Gainesville Marketing + Gainesville, FL.” If your business isn’t showing up on similar, relevant searches, your consumers are heading elsewhere for at least one of these reasons:

• They aren’t aware your company exists.
• They don’t know your company has a local location.
• They don’t know the name or URL of your company to look you up directly.
• They aren’t willing to do more than one search for information.

Make sure your company isn’t missing out on consumers by implementing local SEO.

Pay-per-click (PPC) Marketing

The majority of eCommerce businesses use only PPC marketing for their online campaigns. ECommerce consumers are very unique when compared to consumers as a whole. They generally know what they want and what they’re willing to pay before they ever click an ad or arrive at a landing page. And they make their decision to purchase from a company incredibly fast. Within seconds of arriving at your call-to-action or homepage, an eCommerce consumer will either decide to buy, try to find out more about your company, or exit your page.

We want to make sure that your eCommerce consumers are finding your site and sticking with it through the call-to-action, conversion or sale. We offer conversion design optimization for websites, landing page designs for a better consumer experience, mobile website design to accommodate consumers who browse from handheld devices, and many analytics and development services that are proven to improve PPC marketing techniques.

Bringing It All Together

How important is it to raise your organic search engine rankings? Consider this: 70% of the links that users click on a SERP are organic, not paid-for links. Now, we’re not suggesting that you skip PPC marketing, because for eCommerce clients, PPC is largely the source of your conversion rates and sales. But, if you’ve only been focusing on PPC, then think how much your sales could improve if you’re appealing to more than one type of consumer. By utilizing a strong PPC and effective SEO marketing strategies, you’ll put your business in a better position to grow.

Many of our eCommerce clients in Gainesville skimp or completely skip local SEO marketing. They argue that since all of their sales are conducted online, there’s no point to putting time and effort into a strong local SEO campaign. That’s one way to look at it, and we do see why they might believe such a thing. But, if you’re doing business in Gainesville, we recommend that you still list your company on local listings and network publishing sites. Why? Loyalty and representation are at the heart of a lot of consumers. If consumers know they can do business with a local company, they are more likely to purchase, and sometimes, pay more. Consumers often enjoy supporting their local community, and appealing to your local audience can build brand loyalty and well as put you in a position to create your own local business network.

So, which marketing technique is right for you?

Gainesville Marketing is here to help you determine which marketing techniques you want to implement for your business. We can improve upon existing strategies or form new plans to reach your goals. Our goal, at the end of the day, is to provide you proven techniques that deliver measurable results so that your business can grow.